The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker, Reviewed by Charlie Jack Joseph Kruger

www.charliejackjosephkruger.com

There is a run of authors that I see as the sorta 'big 4' of modern horror. Stephen King, Peter Straub, Thomas Harris, and Clive Barker. Of these four, Clive Barker has always been the dangerous one. Stephen King, even at his most sickly and cruel never touched the vicious profanity and sacrilege that Barker bathes his writing in. Peter Straub moves with focus and precision, keeping his horrors tight, and in short controlled bursts, ever ascending to the dizzying bacchanal of Barker's flirtations with anthemic depravity. And Thomas Harris, a supreme master of terror and function, makes every move with such baffling conviction and contemplation that his 'Hannibal' trilogy is unrelenting without ever embracing the moist sadosexuality of Barker's best demons. Clive Barker has always aimed for the carnal. With 'Cabal', 'Hellbound Heart', 'Damnation Game' and the varied 'Books of Blood', he wrote from behind a veneer of hyper-sexuality and knuckle-breaking disregard for tact. His characters have been invasive, exploitative, and most of all, cruel.

For the past few books, Barker has seemingly pulled himself away from the carnal death-dreams of his earlier work, and set himself in both young adult, and mild-fantasy novels. Even the character of Harry D'Amore found himself utilized in stories less guttural and viscous, and more charming and even tongue in cheek. With 'The Scarlet Gospels' both of these modes of storytelling, the profane and the winking self-aware, collide. And they collide well. The classic Barker-esque descriptions and situations paired themselves well with the more mature, more flavored prose and dialogue of his later career.

Set as a sequel to Harry's stories, and to 'The Hellbound Heart', peppered with references and moments to 'Coldheart Canyon', 'The Great and Secret Show' and others, this book seems like a last will and testament. As I read through the intoxicating novel, I felt like I was in a graveyard, watching stories, characters, ideas, fragments of Barker himself, being put to rest. Being given endings, traumatic or serene, that are permanent. The climactic swelling of the novel begins almost as soon as the book is opened, and it is sustained skillfully by Barker.

It would have been easy for him to extend this story, make this another massive swollen novel of 600-800 pages plumped with tirades, trails, side-stories, and fragments of other books brought into clearer light... but thankfully Barker instead chose brevity. The most horrifying moments of Barker's career have been found in his shorter fiction. The novellas 'Cabal', and 'The Hellbound Heart' and again, the 'Books of Blood' hold his strongest punches. And so almost as if knowing that, Barker doesnt let this book roll on too long. He keeps it focused, concentrated, condensed. He keeps it pure. And that purity is ghastly.

Another massive strength of this novel is the iconic authority of the Hell Priest (the unlovingly named 'Pinhead') and how Barker plays with it. For example, the novel never explicitly states it, or makes it clear between the two covers, wether it is a sequel to 'The Hellbound Heart', the movies 'Hellraiser' or 'Hellbound: Hellraiser 2', or some amalgam of them both. It simply exists in another time, with our spiked demon at the helm once more. And because through 9 films (yeah, there are a lot of debates to be had about that number, and i'll have them, but this isnt the place) and countless pop culture appropriations and effigies the Hell Priest has become a social power all unto himself. As a result, he needs no introduction, no description no details, and no explanation. He is as much an assumed character as Satan himself is. And any reader of Barker's is already familiar with Harry D'Amore, so again, no introduction is needed. Because there is no need for table-setting or preparation, this book is effective in being a full on 360 page climax. A final action set after a 30 year initial incident.

While the book's ending is surprisingly neat and tidy, I was left wanting more. Not because the story is incomplete, or that the writing is lacking, but because by the end of the novel, our familiar (and new) faces have become weathered and honed. They become, in effect, new characters. Characters I want to explore more heavily. Characters that Barker should be proud of.

This is a phenomenal return of one of my favorite contemporary authors. This is a must-read book for 2015.

Meet Polkadot - Olympia's Own Non-binary Gendered Trans Children's Book Character

Not only does Olympia's own Danger Dot Publishing have the corner on this particular niche market of kids books on a local level with this beautiful story in a burgeoning field of interest, but they've also successfully helped 17 LGBTQ Ugandans escape oppression via their own kind of 'underground railroad'. They get my 'this is fucking righteously awesome award so far this year. -skycosby

________________________________________________

Now available at Last Word Books, as well as at the publisher's website:

http://dangerdot.com/ordermeetpolkadot/

“Meet Polkadot,” is an accessible introduction to the main character in our series, Polkadot. Polkadot as well as Polkadot’s big sister Gladiola and best friend Norma Alicia, introduce our readers to the challenges and beauty that are experienced by Polkadot as a non-binary, trans kid. While Gladiola learns how to engage with information that she “didn’t know she didn’t know,” Norma Alicia provides Polkadot with a generous, additional perspective on how identities intersect and how allyship works. “Meet Polkadot,” tells Polkadot’s story from a transgender-liberation and feminist perspective and explores the complexity of identity in gentle and real terms. For ages 3-130!

Book Review: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Fans of this blog may recall that last month I reviewed Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, where I wrote,

There are no words to adequately express how entertaining and fun Ready Player One (RP1) is to read.

 Well, sorry, but I'm about to repeat myself: there are also no words to express how entertaining and fun Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is to read. It's like David Foster Wallace and William Gibson collaborated to produce a beastly crossbreed between Infinite Jest and Neuromancer. The cyberpunk motifs and action are at work like a fission-powered freight-jet, but narrated in the weird, colloquial, hyper-language of a Hal Incandenza soliloquy. It's as though some Bill-Gates-type-guy in the 25th century invented a time machine, traveled back to the present day to observe my reading tastes, traveled further back to kidnap Gibson and Wallace, threw them into an interdimensional prison (which exists outside of time), and forced them to write the precise novel that my own personal literary tastes hanker for. It's like Ready Player One, but better. It's like fucking Christmas.

Paragraph one:

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hollowed sub-category. He's got espirit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has a sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telophone books.

This is a description of a pizza-delivery driver.

Let's run through the paces: Snow Crash takes place in your standard cyberpunk global social/environmental-collapse cum virtual-reality world. There is a sexily grungy hacker who fights with his father's katana. There is a precocious teenage female skateboarder who hitches rides by harpooning the backs of moving cars. (If you've read Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, you'll recognize her as more-or-less identical to Robin.) There is a mad Russian(-ish) sidekick playing nihilistic power-metal. There are various puppet masters, of varying moral shades. There is a demonic warrior who fights with harpoons and knives. There are robot guard dogs. There are slaughtered skinheads. There's a guy with a glass eye and a gun from hell. People say things like "I can't believe you took a hypercard from a black-and-white person" and "How sweet!" and "Me cop, you thrasher. How you gonna make a case at Judge Bob's Judicial System?" and "Back to work--this is no time for a hard-on" and "But I figure that the Big Wop will be a lot less likely to throw a Stinger through the turbine of my chopper there if he knows his little chiquita is on board" and "Swords don't run out of ammo."

On the other hand, there's also a lot of weird back-plot about, like, ancient Sumerian mind-hackers, or something? We're getting into PLOT SPOILER territory here, but quite a few pages are spent explaining how ancient Sumerians were subjected by the cosmic Meta-Virus (?!) to a sort of hive-language which reduced them to zombie-slaves, but then Enti, an ancient mind-hacker (?!), created a linguistic counter-virus which caused them all to speak different languages (?!) and thus precipitated individuation of human consciousness (?!). This is the historical basis for the legend of Babel (somewhere, there are Christian fundamentalists reading this and applauding). Somehow this lead to the Hebrews, who started the first rational religion (?!), but then it got, like, ossified and stale, so Jesus came to re-inject the language-counter-virus (?!), but the proto-Catholic Church contained it shortly after his death (I'm not even gonna make the ?! anymore, just take it as implied), and then the rise of Pentecostalism around 1900 brought "speaking in tongues," AKA ancient Sumerian hive-language, back to the mainstream, and now the hive language (which is also herpes, or something) is gonna infect all of humanity. Or something.

What. The. Fuck.

Stephenson's Sumarian-virus back-plot is equally bizarre and implausible. I don't just mean literally implausible--this is a work of fiction, after all. I mean it's implausible within the otherwise-internally-coherent universe of Snow Crash. Everything else makes the shimmering psuedo-sense of good fiction. But then Stephenson has his characters make these bizarre, intuitive connections between random historical events, and they turn out to be exactly right. Reading these sections, I felt as though Stephenson himself had begun to speak in tongues, and I just had to plunge through until he started making sense again.

Drawback number two is that the conclusion of the book sacrifices depth for punch. As soon as the reeeeeeally long series of pyrotechnic-acrobatics which serves as the book's (admittedly thrilling) climax is completed, the book stops. Not ends; stops. Shit ceases to explode, a quarter-page is spent describing how nothing's happening, and then there's blank space. Reading this, I felt cheated: I felt like the emotional connection I'd made with the characters (who are pretty well developed) had just been a ruse to get me worked up during the action-packed finale. Imagine if Star Wars: Return of the Jedi had climaxed with the Luke/Vader lightsaber duel and the explosion of the Death Star,...and then the credits immediately rolled. No Han/Lea reconciliation. No hint of Luke's destiny. Just: "BOOM!...(credits)." That's what the end of this novel is like: a climax, but no ending.

Still, this book is amazingly good. Aside from the two problems mentioned above, it's damn near perfect. Reading it, I got used to laughing out loud every few pages. Sometimes this was because something funny had happened, but more often it was sheer glee at the awesome spectacle unfolding before me on the page. My partner knows a lot more about its plot than he wants to, because I interrupted him so often to force upon him updates on what was going on in the book. Really, it's just a geeky, gory, glorious work. It's so, so much fun. I strongly recommend it.

Book Review: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

There are no words to adequately express how entertaining and fun Ready Player One (RP1) is to read. The setup: after reinventing the internet into an MMORPG, an eccentric gazillionare plants a treasure hunt within said online world and then dies. The prize for being the first to solve the treasure hunt is, you inherit his gazillions and a controlling share of his company. Our unlikely hero, a trailer kid, relies on his wits and obsession to solve the puzzle before an evil army of corporate-owned thugs do (and thus gain control of said online world, in order to monetize it with lame ads and user fees).

An engrossing geekfest awash in 80s pop culture and scif-fi magic, the novel ratchets one suspension upon another so that your eyes are laser-riveted to the page. I read this book in two days, and it would have been more like most of one day if I didn't have to eat, sleep, and work. The best I can compare it to is the final Harry Potter book: while reading the latter right after it came out, I responded to requests for my time with statements like "But there's goblins!"

Actually, we can probably squeeze a lot of juice out of that comparison. RP1 is remarkably similar to Harry Potter, but in a different setting and compressed into one novel.

Like Harry Potter (and Luke Skywalker, and King Arthur, and Charlie Bucket, and Superman), RP1's protagonist Wade Watts is a bereft orphan. Rather than a room under the stairs in the British suburbs, he occupies the laundry room of a high-rise trailer in pre-apocalyptic Kentucky. Wade's aunt, like Harry's, is equal parts hateful and pitiful. Like Harry, he's isolated, peerless, filled with self-doubt, and longs to escape his blandly crippling surroundings.

Unlike Harry (and Luke and Neo and Arthur and Superman and Jesus), Wade is not destined for heroic greatness. No elderly mage shows up on his doorstep and announces, "You're the one!" Wade's protagonism is the result of his own choice: pursuing the puzzle gives meaning to his otherwise horrifically banal life, and so he spends years pouring over available clues. This is a significant departure from the formula that this novel generally follows: conventionally, the hero has to 1) receive the call to adventure, 2) reject the call to adventure, and 3) be persuaded by circumstances to change his mind and accept the call to adventure. Remember in A New Hope when Obi-Wan's all like, "There is great juju in you, Luke" and Luke's like "Aw, I can't be a Jedi, I have to go tend the farm" and then they find Luke's ENTIRE FAMILY SLAUGHTERED BY A PLOT DEVICE? Or when Neo refuses to venture out onto the skyscraper ledge 'cause he's scared, but then later finally jumps into his destiny? Or when Bilbo's like "I'm just a little hobbit, I can't go on an adventure!" Or when, later on, Aragorn abandons his crown to live the simple life of a ranger, only to, uh, "Return (as) the King?" Or when (sorry if you actually watched this movie) the guy who plays Legolas starred in Kingdom of Heaven, and Liam Neeson was all like "You are my son. Join me in the Crusades" and Legolas was all like "No way, dude. I'm not an adventurer. I'm just going to sob on my wife's heathen corpse" and then Legolas BARBECUES HIS PRIEST WITH A FIRESWORD and flees town to catch up with Neesen et al? Or (in a much better film by the same director) Maximus gets asked by Marcus Aurelius to become the new leader of Rome, and Maximus is like "I just want to go home to my wife and kids, I don't want to rule" and then Marcus Aurelius also gets slaughtered by a patricidal plot device? I'm not making this up, dude: the hero is supposed to reject the Call before he accepts it. Throughout his entire series, Harry Potter struggles with the demands and expectations that his legacy puts upon him; one could even claim that he continuously rejects the call to adventure until the last book, when he's finally like "Fuck it, let's find and kill Voldemort. I'm tired of this shit."

But not Wade. Wade's interest and success in the treasure hunt (which they call an "egg hunt," by the way, 'cause the clues are hidden like easter eggs) are heavily influenced by fate and circumstance, yes: he was just the right age at just the right time in history to become infatuated with the egg hunt, and (PLOT SPOILER) he's able to find the first egg because of his rather specific circumstances as a dirt-poor schoolchild.BUT! It was never fated that he specifically would find the first clue. Any number of other dirt-poor schoolchildren might have. And Wade never rejects the call: he never says, "No, no, I can't pursue a series of hidden easter eggs across the virtual universe. I have to tend my garden." From page one, Wade is committed to winning the hunt, period.

Also like Harry Potter, Wade inhabits a more-or-less magical world. For Wade, this takes the form of virtual reality rather than an alternate reality, but the function is the same: there's a second, better world for the reader to explore via the protagonist's journey, filled with interesting characters and locales. What makes RP1 exceptionally cool is that Wade's magical world is an amalgamation of dozens of cool worlds we've already known and loved. Here's how it works: the MMORPG (which is called "the OASIS," by the way) was designed by future-Steve-Jobs (who is named James Halliday, by the way). Halliday is your standard autistic genius: brilliant at computers, terrible at social interaction. Halliday also happens to be obsessed with 80s pop culture, because that was the decade of his adolescence, and he works his obsession with the 80s into the easter egg hunt. Because the hunt requires players to be deeply versed in 80s pop culture, and because the hunt is itself a big world event circa 2040, 80s pop culture makes a huge comeback. Add to this the fact that Halliday built various worlds from 80s pop culture into the OASIS (e.g. the metropolis from Blade Runner, the cyberpunk cities from William Gibson novels, etc.), and you've got a novel which allows the reader to simultaneously explore a magical new world and recognize it. So, for example, we get to see flying robots from late 70s Japanese cartoons amass alongside a World of Warcraft-type army outside a Dungeons and Dragons-type castle, with spacecraft from Star Wars and Firefly and Battlestar Galactica whizzing overhead. Nerdgasm!

Two last observations to add: first, Cline is just one hell of a writer. There is not a boring moment in this book, nor is there a single moment of incoherent action. Everything that happens is an engrossing step toward the climax; there isn't, say, a three-chapter stretch in the middle where the protagonist goes on some action-packed sub-quest that turns out to relate in no way to the rest of the novel. Keeping a novel moving without losing any elegance is a hard trick to pull off, and I applaud Cline for managing it.

Second, Cline's not writing pure escapist fiction. Remember when (I think it was in book #5 or #6?) Harry encounters the Ministry of Magic's penchant for torturing suspected Voldemortists? That was pretty obvious (and effective) social commentary on the corrosive influence of real-world torture in the "War on Terror." Well, RP1 is concerned with environmental collapse, loss of social security nets, and the concentration of private wealth. Here's an excerpt from p. 1:

At first, I couldn't understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaire's death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars...Normally, the newsfeeds didn't interrupt everyone's interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major city vanishing in a mushroom cloud. Big stuff like that.

The fallout of environmental and social collapse is evident throughout the novel: the protagonist's "hideout" is (SPOILER ALERT) located inside a massive pile of automobiles that were abandoned by their owners when the gasoline ran out. When he buses across a few states, his Greyhound has a squad of armed guards to fight off any road bandits they might encounter. Plus keep in mind that the villain in this novel is an evil corporation, and their evil plan is to basically monetize the internet (a timely social concern if ever there was one). Interestingly (SPOILER ALERT), neither the problem of environmental/social collapse nor the evil corporation get dealt with within the story, even though they're the backdrop and engine for most of what happens. Wade wins the contest and saves the OASIS, but the bigger problems remain. Is this Cline's way of acknowledging the perennial nature of evil? Or of nodding to us, as if to say, "Wade didn't fix it. So what are you going to do?"

I could keep going about all the cool stuff in RP1--the Orwellian interlude in Act III, the wonderful atheist rant in chapter one, the extensive use of Wargames and Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, the respectful  worship of Pac Man and Joust--but that would only serve to further blunt the delightful surprises that this book holds in store for you. I cannot recommend Ready Player One strongly enough. It is the most fun I've had in a book in years.

Book Review: John Dies at the End, by David Wong

John Dies at the End (JDatE) is a sort of sprawling, ill- or un-designed shantytown of clever ideas held together by duct tape and enthusiasm. The cover advertises that it's like Steven King + Douglas Adams, and this is pretty much accurate. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then by all means, read this novel. If you want your fiction to be more than a series of clever punch-lines within a drywall-hollow "story," then I'd suggest Ready Player One instead (review pending).

Don't get me wrong: author and protagonist David Wong is one hell of a writer. His essays are brilliant. Here's a list of pieces he's written for Cracked.com (of which Mr. Wong is an editor), with links:

Five Reasons the Future Will be Ruled By B.S. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html)
Five Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women (http://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html)
Six Moments that Make Video Games Worth It (http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-moments-that-make-video-games-worth-it/)
Was 9/11 an Inside Job? (http://www.cracked.com/article_15740_was-911-inside-job.html)
Five Terrifying Basterdizations of the Wikipedia Model (http://www.cracked.com/article_17341_5-terrifying-bastardizations-wikipedia-model_p2.html)

Also check out this page, which lists all of his work at Cracked.com: http://www.cracked.com/members/David+Wong/

And when I say brilliant, I don't mean sparkler-against-an-overcast-sky brilliant. I'm talking What-would-have-really-happened-if-Tyler-Durden-had-smoked-while-homemaking-explosives brilliant. The essays Wong produces are essentially what yours truly wishes to produce on this little-seen blog: a combination of smart, vulgar wit with deep-cutting analysis. Wong is the best kind of intellectual: the deep thinker who ventures into abstraction, figures something out, and then returns to the dumb/real world and explains his conclusions in language that any ninth grader can understand. Take, for example, 'Five Reasons the Future Will be Ruled By B.S.' Basically, Wong's argument goes like this:

1) In a market, the cost of a commodity is related to the cost of producing it; cheaper production leads to cheaper commodities, and vice versa.
2) Better technology leads to cheaper production of commodities.
3) Our technology has reached the point that producing certain commodities (e.g. e-books) cost of production is virtually nil.
4) You'd think that this would lead to free commodities and wealth for all, a la Star Trek. BUT!...
5) The businesses that make up our economy run on selling stuff for quite a bit more than "virtually nil".
5b) If businesses can't sell stuff, they go out of business.
5c) If lots of businesses go out of business, the economy crashes.
5d) Therefore, businesses need to get us to buy stuff for quite a bit more than it costs to produce it, lest the entire economy crash.
6 and final) Therefore, we need bullshitters (i.e. advertisers) to convince us to buy bullshit we don't need at arbitrarily high prices (i.e. they create artificial scarcity) in order to keep the merry-go-round of the economy spinning. It's fucked up, but there you go.

Wong does a much better job of laying the argument out than I've done here. Now, I'm not saying you have to agree with him (Marxists, for example, are all too thrilled by the prospect of that particular merry-go-round stopping), but the man is a thoughtful, though-provoking, hilarious motherfucker.

Not much of a novelist, though.

Okay, maybe I'm being too hard on him. JDatE is by no means the worst novel ever written: it has a beginning, middle, and climax/resolution (sort of). It has a protagonist, antagonist, sidekick, and love-interest (again, sort of [and actually the love-interest gets switched about a third through the book, like when a TV show fires an actress and replaces her character with another one that's functionally identical but has a different name and hair color]). It has clever dialogue, such as:

"That man, in your, whatever you call it, your communicator. Does he need help?"
"What?"
"He sounds wounded. Does he need your assistance?"
"You're not from around here, are you?"
"Why do you not respond to my questions directly?"
"That's just Fred Durst. On the radio. He's not talking to us."
"Are you certain? It sounds as if he is crying out while someone is strangling him."
"I know. That sound is entertainment to many of us. It's called a 'song.'"
"I know songs. But--I thought they rhymed."

(p.272)

Finally, JDatE does have a plot. Unfortunately, it's presented in such a way that the broad outlines becoming maddeningly obvious early in the story (SPOILER ALERT: evil demons from another dimension are trying to invade our dimension, and the main characters try to stop them by eventually descending into trans-dimensional Hell; plus, there's a lot of dicking around in the middle), while the specifics of the plot are so intricately confused that it becomes waaaaaay too much work to keep track of what's going on (SPOILER ALERT: this specificity-incoherence problem is exacerbated by the fact that the trans-dimensional demons can change history, i.e. what you read about characters doing early in the book doesn't always match what the characters are recalled to have done later in the book, because history changed). This is a big, big problem for a novel: since fictional stories are essentially guided dreams, in which details and specifics are deployed to lull the reader into forgetting that they're reading an obvious lie built of letters on paper, the details need to flow seamlessly into one another. It doesn't matter if the specifics of the story are actually coherent; it only matters that the seem coherent and smooth to the reader. Wong seems unable to pull all his pieces together into a coherent narrative whole. There's so much going on in JDatE--so many long-standing unanswered questions, so many secondary characters, so many AHA! twists and clever reversals--that it's basically impossible to keep track of what's going on. The plot appears as a series of disconnected events: "Now THIS is happening! Now THIS OTHER THING is happening! Now SOME NEW EVENT is occurring!" Characters and objects reappear, and there is a central thread to the story, but it lacks flow. The reader is not so much carried away as they're just awash.

If your plot can't carry the story, then the characters or deep meanings better do it. So far as the latter, JDatE has none that I could find. Sure, it starts out with a narratively-embedded version of the Ship of Theseus, a little story used by philosophers to demonstrate how tricky the concept of identity is. But it doesn't really go anywhere with this ploy: there's just a clever AHA! moment, and then something else happens. And the rest of the novel works in pretty much the same way: some bullshit happens that the reader is sort-of able to follow, while Wong showcases his humor, usually in the form of dialogue, descriptions, and bizarre actions. For example:

I didn't answer, the sound of the commotion dying around me as the heavy monkey of sleep rested its warm, furry ass on my eyelids.

Or:

The group might have either pursued him or raised their rifles to perforate his windshield had a gorilla riding a giant crab not leapt out of the woods and eaten two of them.

It's good stuff. But not enough to carry an entire novel. Nor are the characters up to that particular task: I found myself entirely apathetic as to whether they survived any given debacle (the fact that the protagonist is a bona fide idiot might have something to do with this). Plus they're kind of inconstant: the narrator/protagonist begins the novel as a tight-laced, insecure-but-competent type (like Edward Norton's character in Fight Club), but ends as a sort of socially-incompetent, depressed, barely-repressed-rage guy. The titular John begins as his dopey stoner buddy (like Shaggy from Scooby Doo) and ends as basically Tyler Durden (crude, competent, masculine, successful). The girl, as I've said, goes through two incarnations, both of which alternately fall-for and are-repulsed-by the protagonist, and seem to be there solely for the purpose of providing motivation and a prize to said protagonist (ironically, Wong does a great job criticizing the function of women-as-prizes in fiction, in 'Five Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women'). And there aren't any other developed characters.

So what I'm saying, in summary, is that the story is a kind of hollow, semi-coherent vehicle for Wong's cleverness and wit. Which cleverness and wit are extensive and impressive, but not enough to carry a novel. Nor do they need to--I repeat, David Wong is a brilliant, dazzling essayist. His articles are what my articles aspire to be. My guess is that he's got a great novel inside of him (no gay innuendo intended, brah), and with some solid editorial guidance, JDatE could have brought all its wacky, clever ideas into a coherent whole. But it didn't. Better luck next time, I guess.

PS: Again, maybe I'm being too hard on JDatE. It's not, like, horrifically bad. It's better than, say, your average serialized sci-fi novel. I guess I'm just disappointed at a novel that, based on Wong's essays, I'd expected to be breathtaking. 

"Difficult Conversations": notes for the reading-impaired

Difficult Conversations is a how-to self-help book on negotiating conflict in emotionally-loaded discussions between two people. Authored by members of the Harvard Negotiation Project (which sounds awfully prestigious), the book is lucid and accessible.

A "difficult conversation," according to Stone et al, is "anything you find it hard to talk about":

Sexuality, race, gender, politics, and religion come quickly to mind as difficult topics to discuss, and for many of us they are. But discomfort and awkwardness are not limited to topics on the editorial page. Anytime we feel vulnerable or our self-esteem is implicated, when issues at stake are important and the outcome uncertain, when we care deeply about what is being discussed or about the people with whom we are discussing it, there is potential for us to experience the conversation as difficult.

Per the authors, there are three dimensions to a difficult conversation: practical substance ("the What Happened conversation"), emotional (or inter-personal) subtext, and identity (or inner-personal) subtext. Pointing out something that's both obvious and easy to miss, Stone et al point out that difficult conversations are rarely about what's true so much as they're about what's important, and a lot of trouble can be saved when participants are careful to distinguish between factual claims and value claims.

 The What Happened conversation consists of the concrete matter of dispute, such as a friend's drug abuse or a boss' bullying. Stone et al urge readers to keep in mind that facts fit into a story, and disagreements usually stem from different stories rather than conflicting facts. To get past this, it's important to be clear about "what happened" according to you, including the assumptions, values, and past experiences which inform your story; and of course it's just as important to clearly understand the other person's "what happened" story, and where they're coming from. For example, an undocumented migrant laborer and a member of the Romney clan will have very different life-experiences to inform their views on, say, the police. This doesn't mean both are equally right; it just means that if you want to communicate, you've gotta get clear about what you're saying and what the other person's saying.

 Because at bottom, difficult conversations are about feelings. This sounds a little hippie-woo-woo, sure, but when you think about it, what could be more obvious than the fact that emotionally-difficult conversations are difficult because of the emotions at their core. If anger is what's getting in the way of a productive exchange, then you've gotta deal with anger (and the brew of other emotions which are almost always simmering underneath it).

And these strong emotions which can make conversations so difficult are connected not only to the other person, but to internal issues of self-image, confidence, and identity. Your correspondent can report that in his own emotional travails, the times when he's gotten pissy and brutal have been only weakly correlated to something shitty the other person did. (When I'm internally okay, it's hard for other people to hurt me.) Incidents of pissy brutality strongly correlate, on the other hand, to my own shame, inadequacy, etc. (When I'm hurting and desperate, I'll find something to be angry about.) Anger is an easier emotion to handle than self-loathing or incompetence; like a nation which goes to war rather than address domestic inequality, getting pissed off is a way to dodge your own spiritual self-improvement.

So those are the three conversations: the "What Happened" conversation, the emotions conversation, and the identity conversation. The three bleed into each other like pages of a damp sketchpad, with "What Happened" ("You tattled on me to the boss") serving as an unconscious metaphor for emotional ("I feel betrayed, hurt, angry, and confused") and identity ("I fear that other people don't value me or take me seriously") subtext. Again, this all sounds really whiny and touchy-feeling, like a new-age inner-child symposium complete with re-birthing ceremonies and 'Song of Myself' creative re-writes. But, again, here's the juice: people fundamentally act based on emotion and self-identity. We are not a species of Spocks; we are a species of McCoys. If you want to ignore emotions, you're free to emulate the hollow machismo of Sly Stallone and the GOP; but if you want to have productive conversations about blood-pressure-raising topics, you've gotta address identity and emotions. And if you want to behave rationally, you've gotta manage your emotions first. You cannot will yourself to emotional balance. This means doing stuff like learning to listen to your own emotions, and thinking hard about which emotions you've learned are appropriate and which are taboo, and thinking about how you've learned to express your emotions.

Strategies for hearing where the other person is coming from, and for difficultly conversing in general, include:

-Shut up and listen. Don't pretend to listen, don't interrupt, don't nod while thinking about how you're going to respond. Listen.

-If you're too keyed-up and can't listen, then say so: "What you're saying is important to me and I want to hear it. But I'm having a hard time concentrating on what you're saying, because I feel really angry and cornered right now. Having put that out there, I'd like to try again to hear what you've got to say."

-Ask questions--real questions, not statements cloaked as rhetorical questions or cross-examination questions designed to show the internal contradiction in what the other person is saying. Genuinely try to understand where the other person is coming from. Paraphrase what you're hearing from them, to make sure you've got it right.

-What's their story? What's at stake for them? What's the cost for them to accept your version of the story?

-Find common ground between your story and theirs by thinking of how a disinterested observer might describe things: "Jesse smokes a pack a day. He does this because cigarettes help him deal with stress and depression, and he's afraid of failing if he tries to quit. His sister Joan hates that he smokes because of smoking's health effects, plus she finds cigarettes gross." Stone et al call this the "Third Story." You can talk about What Happened and how it was perceived and felt by both parties in neutral terms (indeed, that's often what we mean when we refer to "reality": it's just consensus-perception). Doing this gets all the important pieces out in the open without triggering anyone.

-Acknowledge what you hear from them. Sometimes someone really just needs to be hears: "I hear that you were hurt by what I did." Sometimes that's all you need. And by the way, acknowledging ≠ agreeing or ceding your view. Beware either/or dichotomies...

-...Speaking of neither "either" nor "or," you should make it a habit to say "and" instead of "either/or" in difficult conversations: "I didn't finish the assignment by the deadline AND I thought I communicated clearly that I was behind schedule AND I hear you when you say that you didn't find that to be clearly communicated AND part of why I was behind was the other extra work you asked me to do AND I can see how it impacts you for me to miss the deadline AND...etc." As Whitman put it, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Don't oversimplify the issue, like politicians do (e.g. "Either you support the war, or you don't love America"). Recognize the smorgasbord of facts, observations, values, interpretations, etc. which inform both you and the other person.

-Disentangle intent from impact: what the other person meant to do ≠ what their effect was. You know what their impact was; you don't know what their intent was.

-At the same time, good intentions don't sanitize bad impact (think of drunk driving). Own your impact.

-Don't refrain from re-framing! Figure out how to frame the issue in a way that's accurate and rings true while also allowing you to work toward a solution. The difference between "I'm a useless scumhole junkie" and "I struggle with addiction" is nothing other than framing, but that difference is the basis of recovery.

-Name the Dynamic: if there's some sort of pattern which keeps the conversation from moving forward--the other person keeps cutting you off, or changing the subject--you can make that pattern itself a topic of the conversation. "I've noticed that several times when I've started to talk about the class schedule, you've interrupted me. Does that seem accurate to you? Can you think of what might be causing that?" The downside of this tactic is that it distracts the conversation (e.g. about the class schedule) into a meta-conversation.

-Work on a solution together, as a joint-exploration. Consider alternatives and compromises, and always try to work on the assumption that the other person is acting in good faith and on honest purposes (recall: their impact ≠ their intentions).

Blame vs. Contribution
Don't talk about blame; talk about contributions to the problem. This is philosophy 101 stuff, but the difference between having caused something vs. being responsible for something is massive. Cause is about the chain of events which lead to some outcome. Responsibility (or blame) is a complex, socially-constructed ethical claim. Think again of a drunk driver who runs over a pedestrian: it's obvious that the driver is responsible (or blameworthy) for the accident. But it's also obvious that the pedestrian contributed to the accident by walking across the street; similarly, the driver's friends contributed by not doing more to keep him from drinking and driving. Talking about blame is useful if the goal of the conversation is figuring out who to punish. But if your goal is to problem-solve, then talking about contribution instead of blame frees you from decreeing a judgment and lets you concentrate on the practical question of, "What can we change to fix this in the future?" Concentrating on blame also prevents the conversation from addressing systems of contribution, by focusing on individual actors: for example, it's much easier to blame Romney or Obama or whoever than it is to think about the complex web of contribution which causes the US government to behave in the way that it does. (That doesn't mean you shouldn't get angry, just that your anger should be directed toward finding solutions rather than scapegoats.)

Also, when you try to raise the issue of contributions during a difficult conversation, own your contributions to the problem first, then explain what you think they contributed. This may take the other person off the defensive and make them more open to hearing about their own contribution, because it signals that you're not trying to cast them as the sole villain. And always make your reasoning explicit: "Here's what I think you contributed, and here's why I think that..."

3 Facts About Yourself Which Are Helpful to Keep In Mind
1. "I will make mistakes."
2. "My intentions are complex."
3. "I have contributed to the problem."

4 Ways to Regain Balance When You Feel a Mel-Gibson-level Freakout Coming On
1. Let go of trying to control their reaction. That's outside your power.
2. Prepare (emotionally, ahead of time) for their response.
3. Imagine yourself in the distant future, to get some perspective on just how important this conversation really is.
4. Take a break if you need it.

4 Liberating Assumptions
1. "It's not my responsibility to make things better; it's my responsibility to try my best.
2. "They have limitations, too."
3. "This conflict is not about who I am."
4. "Letting go doesn't mean I no longer care."
Bonus: "I am the ultimate authority on me: how I feel, what I value, how I'm affected, etc."

3 Purposes In a Conversation (That Work)
1. Learning the other person's story.
2. Expressing your views and feelings.
3. Problem solving together.
4. Convincing the other person it's their fault, thus proving you're an impeccable badass. 

Even If You Can't Work It Out
Keep in mind that all this hippie-dippy stuff about listening to the other person's story and exploring feelings and reframing blame into contribution doesn't mean you cave into whatever they want you to do. Contra John McCain, there is a difference between listening to someone you disagree with and consenting to their demands. You can make strong demands on someone without acting like a bully or a blowhard.

If you do end up without an amenable solution, be clear about what you're doing and why. Don't be passive-aggressive; be calm-assertive. "While I think I understand why you want me to stay, I'm still going to leave this company in two weeks. As I've said, the pay is better, and I don't feel confident enough about working conditions here for me to stay on. But I appreciate you taking the time to discuss this with me...etc."

Having a Book Moment with Jon Longhi - Fresh Titles from Last Gasp

We have access to Last Gasp's full catalog, so if you spot anything on their site you'd like for Christmas, wander on in and we'll order a copy for ya.



From Wikipedia: 

Founded in 1970 by Ron Turner^[3][4][5] to publish the ecologically-themed comics magazine Slow Death Funnies, followed by the all-female anthology It Ain't Me Babe, Last Gasp soon became a major part of the underground comics/comix movement. Notable artists published by Last Gasp include Tim Biskup, Robert Crumb, Richard Corben,Ron English, Camille Rose Garcia, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Spain Rodriguez, Mark Ryden, Dori Seda, Larry Welz,Robert Williams, and S. Clay Wilson. In the early 1980s Last Gasp published some of the first books about the West Coast punk rock scene.

Current publishing

Today Last Gasp publishes few comic books, though they have published English-language versions of some mangatitles, including Barefoot Gen, Pure Trance and Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. The company publishes art and photography books, graphic novels, fiction, and poetry. Last Gasp operates as a publisher, distributor, and wholesaler for books of all types, often with a lowbrow art and counterculture focus.^[6]

Interesting New Title

We recently ordered copies of The Last Policeman by Ben Winters after reading the following review by Mark Frauenfelder on boingboing.net. We'll let you know how it goes, but if you're interested there'll be a couple extra copies down here at the store.

The Last Policeman: solving a murder before an asteroid wipes out life on Earth

Mark Frauenfelder at 4:28 pm Sat, Nov 10

Last year I read Bedbugs, Ben Winters' psychological thriller/horror novel about a woman who was certain that her apartment was filled with bedbugs, while her husband was telling her that she was imagining them. It reminded me of Rosemary's Baby, one of my favorite movies.

The Last Policeman is Ben Winters' third novel (he also wrote Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters , which I have not read), and I enjoyed it even more than Bedbugs. It's a noir-ish whodunit that opens with New Hampshire police detective Hank Palace (who narrates the story) standing inside a McDonald's restroom, examining the body of a dead man. All of the evidence points to suicide, but Palace has a hunch the man was murdered and that the murderer had set the corpse up in the restroom to make it look like he'd hung himself. Palace wants to pursue the murder angle, But the other police officers and the assistant district attorney on the scene don't seem to care one way or the other what happened. As I read this part, I wondered why no one but Palace was interested in learning the truth.

A few pages later I learned that the world of The Last Policeman was very different than our world. Palace says:

I follow Michelson’s gaze to the counter and the red-faced proprietor of the McDonald’s, who stares back at us, his unyielding gaze made mildly ridiculous by the bright yellow shirt and ketchup-colored vest. Every minute of police presence is a minute of lost profits... I scowl and turn my back on the owner. Let him stew. It’s not even a real McDonald’s. There are no more real McDonald’s. The company folded in August of last year, ninety-four percent of its value having evaporated in three weeks of market panic, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of brightly colored empty storefronts. Many of these, like the one we’re now standing in, on Concord’s Main Street, have subsequently been transformed into pirate restaurants: owned and operated by enterprising locals like my new best friend over there, doing a bustling business in comfort food and no need to sweat the franchise fee. There are no more real 7-Eleven’s, either, and no more real Dunkin’ Donuts.

Book Review pt. 2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carre

Le Carre is a writer for the ages. Le Carre is our Joseph Conrad.

In Lord Jim, for instance, themes of guilt, redemption, courage and chance are woven into the story of the titular Jim, whose moment of youthful weakness haunts him to the ends of the Earth. When we see Jim sweating at his trial, or hopefully growing into the hero he wishes to be, or caught between the story of who he was and the story of who he's become, we see a discussion of big, important questions about how to live as a human being, a discussion that isn't reducible to an expository essay. And this discussion is built up within a straightforward adventure story: a dashing hero fights natives and pirates in an exotic locale. Conrad uses the nautical adventure story as the scaffold on which he builds his high-fallutin' Literature.

Le Carre does the same with spy stories. In Tinker we see a straightforward plot unfold from a simple premise: there's a mole in the highest echelons of British intelligence, and a retired genius quietly returns to give chase. Let's be clear: this is the same plot as the first Mission: Impossible film. This plot could not be more recognizable.

Book Review pt. 1: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carre

An obvious fact: Great literature connects the particular with the universal, the banal with the sublime, the mortal with the transcendent. The alchemy of fiction bridges little, familiar things with big, awesome things.

Without thematic transcendence, Moby Dick would just be an extremely long story about a crazy guy trying kill a whale.

Book Review: Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre

Note: this review was originally published at www.earthlightbooks.blogspot.com.

John le Carre's been a bestselling author for twice as long as I've been alive. By itself, that doesn't mean much: Michael Crichton, whose novels are marginally more intellectually stimulating than repeated punches to the head, published the breakout-hit The Andromedea Strain in 1969, just six years after le Carre's career-establishing bestseller The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Popularity is no guarantee of quality.

But neither does popularity preclude it. (Witness JK Rowling, William Shakespeare, and Salmon Rushdie.) While it's easy to presume le Carre's work to be standard 'page-turner' pulp like John Grisham or Dan Brown--in which cardboard characters and shallow cliches are hitched to a fast-moving plot--the fact is that his novels are of a different order than the rest of the bestselling thrillers he's shelved with. Le Carre, above all, is a master of psychological motivation: his spy stories show us characters whose talent at dissembling wreaks dysfunction on the rest of their lives. His spymaster George Smiley is the anti-James Bond: a humble, thoughtful, slow-moving investigator whose success at espionage is matched only by his incompetence at real life.

Le Carre is also one of our best social prophets. He began writing while he worked for British intelligence in the post-WWII period, and his insider's perspective produced sympathetic and complex portraits of Cold War maneuvering. The fall of the Berlin Wall made his writing no less astute: with end of Soviet communism, le Carre accurately perceives that the greatest threat to liberal democracy today is the creeping influence of private capital. He displays this marvelously in The Constant Gardener, which is based upon a real case of corporate malfeasance in the developing world. In 2003, at the height of war-fever, he published this editorial denouncing the Iraq invasion as the duplicitous, destructive stunt which it was (and is now, in hindsight, widely recognized as).

Our Kind of Traitor is le Carre's most recent work, published in 2010. It's no coincidence that it came out two years after the 2008 financial crash; at the center of Traitor's plot is the influence of capital itself. For le Carre, black markets are to global capitalism as the repressed Id is to the Super-Ego for Freud, or as the Dionysian is to the Apollonian for Nietzsche. Considering that about half the world's jobs are in black- or grey-markets (and that about a seventh of humanity are squatters, and thus necessarily excluded from the legitimate economy), Traitor's basic conflict between the noble true-believers in old-fashioned liberalism vs. the amoral omnipotence of market forces is deeply relevant. In an age when the legitimate economy is on its knees, is it any wonder that our leaders make loud noises about their humanitarian ideals while slyly collaborating with representatives of the shadow market?

Le Carre is a master of plot, character, and social criticism. His latest novel should be on your bedside table.

Book Review Pt. 2: How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen

An Overview of How to Be Alone (See part one of this review here.)

1) 'A Word About This Book'
Authors' prefaces are nigh upon universally self-indulgent; it's hard not to be masturbatory and derivative be when you're writing about your own writing. If the original writing was well-done in the first place, what more could there be to say? So Franzen's introduction is not the best piece in this collection. That said, it's interesting (in a Behind the Scenes EXCLUSIVE! kinda way) to hear his straightforward lament of being a novelist in a world where novels are obsolete and irrelevant, where interviewers "hadn't read the essay, and...the few who had read it seemed to have mis-understood it," and where "Americans seem to be asking even fewer questions about their government today [circa 2002] than in 1991."

2) 'My Father's Brain'

Book Review Pt. 1: How To Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen

WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS (a bit).

Jonathan Franzen has been accused of exorbitant grumpitude, for example here (and here and here and sort-of here too). One gets the idea that he just sort of crouches in his artist's garret, chainsmoking and brainstorming lists of what's wrong with the world, muttering and spitting on cats like that guy in Camus' The Plague.

It's a safe guess that Franzen is so widely crankified because so much of his writing consists of elegantly whinging about the slummy decline of contemporary culture. Strong Motion, The Corrections, and Freedom are each largely driven by people (sweaty, moving, pitiful humanity) vs. capitalism (corporate malfeasance, globalist looting, war profiteering, corporate appropriation of environmentalism, consumer culture, etc. etc.). Franzen doesn't manufacture villains; he just takes soul-devouring elements of the actual, real world and convincingly places them within his fiction. This has the effect of making his stories into polemics. His novels are dangerously relevant.

How to Be Alone, Franzen's 2002 nonfiction essay collection, is pretty dour, too. If the title didn't tip you to its ethos, read Franzen's explanation of same:

With so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily, I've chosen to do only minimal tinkering with the...essays in this book...(T)he local particulars of content matter less to me than the underlying investigation in all these essays: the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone.

Franzen's How to Be Alone is an extended, collected complaint against the political and cultural decline of America and the world. By his own admission, this book is a How-To manual for becoming a Luddite contrarian of the lone-goat, 'Get off my lawn!' style.

Book Review: Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

(Note: this was originally published at www.earthlightbooks.blogspot.com.)

Once upon a time, in the sixties, there was this group of male actors called the "Rat Pack" because they were manly and roguish and did caper films. Then, once upon a time in the eighties, there was this group of young actors called the "Brat Pack" who made teen movies. Critics who remembered the "Rat Pack" of their own youth presumably 1) lacked the originality to come up with a non-derivative title for this group, and 2) liked the patronizing way "Brat Pack" contrasted the young, whiny 80s stars against the old, tough 60s stars. Finally, once upon a time in the slightly later eighties, an article in The Village Voice called a couple of young writers "the literary Brat Pack" and the name caught on.

One of these authors was Brett Easton Ellis, who at the time had published Less Than Zero (about being young, hopeless, beautiful, sexed, and coke-addled) and went on to write one of the most important and controversial novels of the nineties, American Psycho. (I review American Psycho here.)

PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD. Another was Jay McInerney, who'd written Bright Lights, Big City. It's the story of a young, educated writer struggling to come to terms with--we eventually discover--spousal abandonment. This struggle, plus some unresolved stuff with his family, which complements the wife-thing nicely, constitutes the emotional core of the story.

Book Review: the Simulacra, by Philip K. Dick

Warning! PLOT SPOILERS!

I've been trying to read Dick for years, and I could never get through it. Granted, Ubik was probably not best 'read' via audiobook. And Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep? is ill-approached by lovers of Ridley Scott's film adaptation, Bladerunner. Scott's film is sleek and dark and built on aesthetic: there are long, quiet shots of Harrison Ford musing in the rain or flying quietly above a futuristic metropolis.

Dick's writing, by contrast, is stumbling, clever, poorly paced, confusingly plotted, slightly frightening. Paranoid. Bizarre. Dick's plots run like stories told at bar: one gets the sense that he wrote each chapter without much idea of what would happen next, and got progressively more inebriated as he went on.

That said, he's funny.

Review: Delta of Venus and Little Birds, both by Anais Nin

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