A Decade of Archives 6: 2007

This is the sixth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

I'm Not There

2007 began with an outtake from an interview I did with Juliet Ulman of Bantam Books and ended with a rather mysterious announcement on December 24 that I would need to take a break from blogging for a while. The reason for the hiatus was something I discussed in the previous post: my father's death. I last talked with him on my cell phone as I was walking home after seeing Tim Burton's movie of Sweeney Todd, a review of which was the last substantive post I wrote that year; the next afternoon, I got the call from the New Hampshire State Police. The only thing I managed to write between the announcement of my absence and then my later return was a column for Strange Horizons that adds some context to it all, "Of Muses and Ghosts".

One of the reasons for the eventual turn to highlighting film here more often than before, and to doing more and more with film analysis and production in my life, is that it was and is a way of keeping the good memories of my father present and sending all the truckloads of bad stuff to go die with him. Movies were the one thing we incontrovertibly shared, the one thing we could discuss and enjoy together, and my taste in film is/was inextricably bound to his.

There's a Mountain Goats song to go with this (as there is a Mountain Goats song to go with everything), appropriately from the New Asian Cinema EP, "Cao Dai Blowout", which ends:

When the ghost of your father starts pushing you around,
how are you going to make him stop?
I took down all the crosses,
I let him set up shop.

Appropriately for this post, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats also recently expressed quite well what it is like to search through the archives of things you've created: "exhuming the corpses I became at several turns between then and now."

Looking back on 2007 sure feels more like exhuming corpses than the later years have. Some of this has to do with the split I was talking about last time between life before the fall of 2007 and life after. Looking back over 2008, I could read just the titles of almost all of the posts, and certainly of all the ones that weren't just announcements and links, and have at least some memory of what the post was about. I looked at lots of post titles from 2007 and had no idea what the post contained. Reading them was often like reading something written by someone else, someone familiar but now unreachable.

The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck

The Farther Shore is the current LitBlog Co-op pick, and reading it caused me to think about a few different things, given that the novel portrays American soldiers in East Africa. It was, in fact, exactly a year ago that I was a tourist in Kenya, only a few hundred miles away from Somalia, where Matthew Eck had fought for the U.S. Army in the 1990s. A few hundred miles, a decade of years, entirely different worlds. (The U.S. has had a long history in Somalia, with U.S. military operations continuing, though this time as part of operations against al-Qaeda, while the situation remains complex and difficult.)

Before reading The Farther Shore, I wondered about why it needed to be a novel -- why, in these memoir-sodden days of ours, would a writer choose fiction when he could probably have gotten more money and notice by writing about his own experiences? I became a bit skeptical of the fiction, because there were many possible pits it could fall into: politics and polemics overcoming the alternate sort of experience fiction offers; a glorification of the battlefield; all sorts of sentimentality -- the men from various backgrounds who start out distrustful and end up bonded as brothers in blood, or, alternately, the sentimentalism of so much of Hemingway: the hyper-masculine matter-of-fact tone that can't hide the drip of how tough-and-yet-noble it is to be guys being guys. And then there was Africa, which causes even more of my hang-ups to rattle their hangers. It's an unfair prejudice, but I rarely read books about Americans going to Africa. That continent has for too long been used as a literary device for otherness, and I think it's time to read literature by Africans and let them tell their stories for a while. (If we need a place for exoticization, let's use Europe, instead, since European literature has a long and vivid history to counteract our fumbling representations, and there's less chance of doing damage, less chance of our inadvertent, best-intentioned stereotypes propping up a master narrative of dehumanization.)

All of which is just to say that I read and enjoyed The Farther Shore, and if I was able to do that through all the distorting lenses of my biases, then it's clearly got something going on.

A few different things saved The Farther Shore for me. First, the compression of its narrative. This is a very short novel: 173 pages of somewhat large type and pages with a comfortable amount of white space (it's a nicely designed book). It is full of events, but the writing is not that of a novel all about its plot. The plot happens to the characters, and that's part of what the whole book is about, the gravitational force of events. The narrator's life is one where again and again everything changes in less time than it takes for consciousness to catch up. The words don't try to explain it all for us, they don't slow down to let us have a more reflective experience than the characters get. And yet they are more reflective, the words on the page, because the narrator is looking back -- looking back and still wondering what happened.

This is not, then, a novel about Americans going to Africa and getting lots of difficult experience and hard-won knowledge, though their experiences of being separated from their unit and wandering through hostile and indifferent territories is certainly quite difficult. Nor is it the Heart of Darkness Africa where everything's a symbol of metaphysical blight. It's more like a Werner Herzog movie, where people from one world go to another world and moments of comprehension are few. In a sentimental story such moments would be precious and valued and trascendent, but in a more honest tale such as this one, they do nothing so much as highlight how much disconnection there is.

There is strangeness at the heart of the book, too, as the landscape gets sparer and the narrator and his fellow lost boys wander aimless and wounded through senseless ruins. People become little more than objects and stimuli, and I don't think I will soon forget a scene where the narrator is numbly cruel to a little girl. "You never know where to stand in a war," he says in one of the book's most quotable sentences -- and its own quotability, the fine bite of its sound, the pregnant possibilities of its implications, tells us much about where the narrator has gotten to at that point: it's no coincidence that that sentence comes only a few pages after this passage:

"I bet they'll make a movie about us," Zeller said. His face was thin and pale by now, and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, surrounded by dark shadows. He'd lost a lot of weight. We all had. I wondered what I looked like. Maybe like a hero.

"They'll make a movie about us," said Santiago, "made for TV."

We all laughed.

After a while Santiago said, "I wonder if they'll include the kids we killed?"

And so reality gets mediated, and men who have grown up on images of war get battered by war themselves, and in their struggle to enunciate all they have seen and done, they fall back on what they know, seeking a way to fit their lives into a comfortable three-act structure with rising actions and climaxes and good guys making it out okay after struggle and hardship, their actions paved over with swagger.

I wondered what I looked like. Maybe like a hero.

Or maybe not.

I wonder if they'll include the kids we killed.

The novel falters -- perhaps inevitably -- at the end, because once everything has been in extremis there's hardly anywhere else to go. I kept wishing there were a way it could end with the haunting scenes of an abandoned train, rotting on rails going nowhere, an image that becomes, for the characters, something more concrete: a place of rest. I started rewriting the novel in my mind after that point, which is utterly unfair to it, but I'm a playwright at heart and it was such a wonderful set that I wanted it to be the one we stayed with, a variation on Joanne Akalaitis's staging of Beckett's Endgame in a post-apocalypse subway car. Mostly, I just didn't like the last few sentences, which tinkled in my ears like lines from a country song.

It's the imagery that makes this book more than something predictable or familiar, because the ordinary and sometimes cliche-spattered sentences of the soldiers gain, every few pages, some twist or turn to move the language beyond the immediately familiar (though it never, for better or worse, becomes estranging. The imagery is sometimes that of dreams or nightmares, but dreams or nightmares based in a known world, comprehensible. Is this a strength or a flaw? More limitation, I think, or maybe, again, a bias of mine: I like to see the deformation of words alongside the deformation of consciousness.)

Ultimately, this is not a book about Africa at all, which is probably for the best -- it's a book about a person caught by chaos, and chaos knows no geography, but settles wherever it can find some ground. It's a cousin to the reveries of The Short-Timers and Apocalypse Now, but more staid and stoic, with a narrator who observes more than he participates in the whole dream -- even his actions seem separate from his observations, and the effect is the same as what (in completely different circumstances and a completely different work of art) Dr. Dorn in Chekhov's Seagull says is the effect of alcohol: "...your true 'self' fades away and you start seeing yourself in the third person."

The farther shore of the title has various implications, but perhaps in addition to the implications of that image as it is used in the novel there is another one -- an image of a man looking out across the ocean for a self he can no longer distinguish from the horizon and the waves.

Horrifying Slapstick

I can’t control or predict how readers will respond to or understand what I’ve written, but I gather that some readers have found the violence in Jamestown quite horrifying, as I often did while writing it, while others have been inclined to read it as slapstick, as I often did while writing it. I think there are many passages in which characters are deeply disturbed by the violence done to and by themselves, while there are many others in which characters respond glibly and blithely to violence they’ve witnessed or perpetrated. Why write (or intend to write) violence that sometimes feels real and sometimes fake and stylized? I think as a way of representing both the experience of violence and the representation of violence: violence as violence and violence as spectacle. To put it another way, I meant to write a novel in which there is a lot of fluidity among various degrees of abstraction: sometimes it feels real, sometimes it feels fake, and I hope often both, for as the poet William Matthews used to say, "It’s always both."

--Matthew Sharpe
interviewed at Failbetter.com

Jamestown Week Begins

This is the beginning of Jamestown week at the LBC, with much fun and excitement promised. I'm putting together at least one post about the book, but for now will offer some links of related, or even unrelated, interest:

• An interview with Matthew Sharpe at Failbetter.com
• A reading by Matthew Sharpe at NPR
• A Q&A; with Sharpe at New York magazine
  
• A TimeOut New York article about Sharpe and Jamestown
• More Sharpe & Jamestown links from Scott Esposito
  
• John Clute's review: "It is in this treating of its characters as soft-shoe, and of the world(s) they do their numbers on as an extremely slippery stage, that Jamestown seems so 21st-century, so surprisingly capable of making the reader feel that it has been told from some point far beyond the events remembered and anticipated between its opening and its closing curtain."
• Ed Park's review: "On any given page, Sharpe can swing contagious exuberance ('How unpleasant and interesting it is to be alive!') and aphoristic head-scratchers, shrewd pop-culture quotation and hairpin dialogue, the brilliant joke and the dumb joke and the dumb joke repeated enough times that it becomes brilliant."
• Dan Green is ambivalent.
• APVA Preservation Virginia presents the history of Jamestown.
• Virtual Jamestown offers first-hand accounts of Jamestown and maps and images.
  
• ABC News on the history and archaelogy of Jamestown.
• Chief Roy Crazy Horse of the Powhatan Nation on "The Pocahontas Myth".
• Video of Virginia native Katie Couric discussing Jamestown's 400th anniversary.
  
• Video of the demolition of Rhode Island's Jamestown Bridge.
  
• Video of The New World.
• Wikipedia entry on Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
• From The Onion, a story datelined Jamestown, VA: "High School Student Whines His Way to 4.0 GPA".
  

Jamestown It Is

It's LitBlog Co-op time again, and this quarter's pick is Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, a bizarre and wonderfully fun novel that LBC nominator Megan Sullivan sums up well:

Set sometime in the future, this book chronicles a group of settlers from Manhattan traveling South in a large bus/tank to establish an outpost in southern Virginia. The book features historical figures like John Smith, Pocahantas and others. Each chapter tells the story from a different character’s perspective. The settlers are led by John Ratliff, whose mother’s boyfriend is the CEO of the Manhattan Company, who are enemies of the Brooklyn Company. The Indians, who speak English (which they try to conceal to the visitors), aren’t technically Indians. They just try to live like them and are “red” because they’re not using strong enough sunscreen. Powhatan leads them with the help of his advisor Sidney Feingold. Pocahantas falls in love with greasy haired communications officer Johnny Rolfe and saves the life of Jack Smith. Like I said, this book is hard to explain without sounding like a nut. It’s wonderfully imaginative and Sharpe uses language to play with the future and the past in a way that made me giggle and fall in love with the book. Suffice it to say that Sharpe’s masterful writing goes beyond just verbal pyrotechnics into a deeper metalanguage of misunderstandings and what happens when two groups who speak the same language still cannot understand one another.

There will be some little changes in how we present LBC picks this quarter, and bigger changes, I expect, for next quarter. There's a certain blahness to how things have been proceeding, and though we as a group generally agree on nothing else, we're not fans of blahness.

Next up will be posts on the other nominees from this quarter, Nicola Griffith's Always, nominated by Gwenda Bond, and Triangle by Katherine Weber, nominated by Levi Asher. Then each book will get its own week of goodness, culminating with a grand Jamestown fest.

I'll be posting about Jamestown, because that was the only one of the three books to really capture my interest. I liked a lot of what Always was up to, but found the narrative voice off-putting in a way that kept me from caring about the events and characters; I think this is more my fault than the book's. Triangle had some interesting moments, but on the whole I found it too contrived and predictable, and the caricature of an academic it offered was a clichéd stereotype. If the book were the Read This pick, I'd write a dissent, but since it's not, there's no point in my beating up on it any further. Jamestown was, I thought, overlong, but the vigor of its language and the persistent oddity of its vision are admirable, offering many pleasures.

Full Circle

Alan DeNiro:

And so it comes back to emotion, and in a weird way I feel a bit like I've come full circle since when I was 15 and writing poems and stories as a tonic to alleviate my misery. The emotional responses that I write about are part of the world, and part of my engagement with it. This isn't a move toward easy therapeutic confessionalism, but rather to be unafraid to use my self as material, halfway between the public ambulatory life and the private sphere of my own thoughts. To see my imperfections and faults as, perhaps, codes themselves that can at one point be reinterpreted on the page as hope.

LBC Sez, "Read Whilst Skinny Dipping!"

It's time again for another pick from the LitBlog Co-op, and this time it's Alan DeNiro's Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead! I kept quiet during deliberations, because Alan's a friend and I could easily be accused of favoritism, but I'm thrilled the book came out as the top pick. Even if I hated Alan, I'd still like the book. And I don't hate Alan. In fact, Alan and The Mumpsimus have a long history, as he was one of the first writers I ever interviewed here. Later, he participated in the speculative poetry symposium I put together for Strange Horizons. (Nowadays, I hear, he lives in a cardboard box in Montana, where he survives on fried boll weevils and wombat blood. Let no-one suggest that association with this weblog has deleterious effects!)

During Skinny-Dipping week at the LBC, we will be discussing the book as a whole, individual stories, and other topics, and I am frantically searching for the pictures of Alan in a bikini that I have stashed away somewhere...

Catching Up

This blog has been more sporadic and had less content in the past couple months than I would like, but life got suddenly very busy in a bunch of different ways, and I'm still playing catch-up. But some stuff is winding down, and I'm hoping to be able to make things a bit more consistent and varied around here within the next month or so. In the meantime, here are some almost-random fragments of whateverness...

• It's Wizard of the Crow Week over at the LitBlog Co-op. Most, if not all, of my blogging this week will be over there. We've already posted the first part of a roundtable discussion, and we'll have more parts going up later, as well as some contests for people to win copies of the book, a podcast interview with Ngugi, and various other fun things.
  
  
• We're putting the finishing touches on Best American Fantasy and have put out a call for submissions and recommendations for the second volume. The book is currently available for pre-order from Amazon and from Clarkesworld Books, and by its release in June it should be available all over the place. Jeff and Ann have done extraordinary work on it, and the contents will be, we think, exciting and marvelous. (We're keeping a tight lid on the actual choices right now, but have released that we are taking stories from Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Peter LaSalle, Brian Evenson, and Sarah Monette. And lots of others. Some people's first published fiction, some people's gazillionth. Some not so surprising choices, some utterly and completely and magnificently surprising. To be revealed later. Bwahahahahahahaha!)
  
  
• Quick and dirty and probably unfair movie reviews: The Queen: Helen Mirren was pretty good, but I completely don't get why this is such an acclaimed film. The writing seemed clunky, the filming seemed adequate, and none of the actors other than Mirren seemed to be anything more than animatronic. Clearly, I am the wrong audience member. Venus: Now this is my kind of movie. Both touching and mildly icky. (Sometimes icky because of the touching.) There's a complexity to the situations and characters that I didn't expect, and so the disturbing elements of the story -- the mixed-up power relations -- were tempered by an overall humanity. And some utterly perfect scenes, methought, as well as lovely cinematography, marvelous acting, smart writing. The Departed: My favorite Scorsese movie in a while, but that's like saying my favorite shade of beige. I keep trying to like Scorsese's work, because it's one of those things You're Supposed To, but I tend to find it all slick, vapid, and long. At least The Departed is mostly entertaining, and though in general I liked how the characters were fleshed out, I did sometimes prefer the efficiency of the storytelling in its source, Infernal Affairs. Dreamgirls: I only went to see this because everybody else was watching the Superbowl. Definitely not my kind of movie. I think I laughed inappropriately a few times. (Just about the only movie musicals I can stand are Cabaret and All That Jazz. Bob Fosse directing Dreamgirls -- now that would have been interesting...) Some of the songs were tolerable, most of the acting wasn't.
  
  
• A bunch of books have come in recently that are clamoring for my attention, and I barely know what to read next. I've just turned in a review to SF Site of John Crowley's collection of nonfiction, In Other Words, a book I enjoyed very much. I also enjoyed Nick Mamatas's Under My Roof, which I just read because I'm going to interview Nick for Eclectica. (It's a fun little book about family, neighborhood nuclear proliferation, and garden gnomes.) I'm now reading Jan Morris's Hav for a review for Strange Horizons and Fires by Nick Antosca for Rain Taxi. (More on those later.) Next I plan to finish Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital (the bits of which I've read so far I have loved), then proceed on to, perhaps, African Psycho or Carnival or Things in the Night or The Future is Queer or Equiano the African or Breakfast with the Ones You Love or -- and that's not to mention the pile of books out from the library or the pile of books I brought back from Kenya or -- ugh, if only there were time...
  

Demon Theory Week at the LBC

Over at the LitBlog Co-op, it's Demon Theory Week. This book didn't do much for me, but that may have as much to do with me as it, so don't stay away, because the discussion has already gotten interesting.

Seven Loves at the LBC

It's Seven Loves week at the LitBlog Co-op, and I highly recommend stopping by now and then this week, because Valerie Trueblood's novel is absolutely beautiful -- lyrical, affecting, complex, and entrancing (any other quarter, it probably would have been my first pick, but I couldn't help but fall hopelessly in love with Wizard of the Crow). I'm hoping to do a bit of posting about it later in the week, but some unexpected events at work have knocked me a bit behind on things.

LBC Winter Selection, etc.

Over at the LitBlog Co-op is an annoucement of this quarter's Read This! selection, a book that I utterly adore. (And I just about utterly adore one of the other nominees, too, so it seemed to me like one of the stronger quarters the LBC has had in a while. I'll have a lot more to say later.)

Things are likely to be slow here this week (as if they haven't been for the past few weeks...) because we're finishing up work on Best American Fantasy, which is shaping up to be a pretty durn interesting anthology, methinks, and one unlike any other out there. (Not that I'm biased or anything.)

Speaking of BAF, Jeff VanderMeer (who also recommends the LBC pick) has posted his thoughts on some of what we've encountered while reading. I'm still thinking about all this, trying to have something resembling a coherent thought after reading and discussing piles of stories, so I'm going to refrain from saying anything for right now other than that basically I concur with Jeff.

The End of ManBug Week

ManBug Week has wound down over at the the LBC with a podcast interview with George Ilsley created by the great and glorious Carolyn Kellogg of Pinky's Paperhaus and the tenebrous, ranting denizens of The Bat Segundo Show.

I haven't been on a fast enough internet connection yet to listen to the interview, but Carolyn told me she enjoyed talking with George and that he said plenty of illuminating and amusing things, so I'm looking forward to listening to that part of the interview. I'm more wary of the beginning, because Carolyn and I talk about the book for a moment before introducing George, and I expect I sound like an idiot. Ignorance is, perhaps, bliss.

Manbug

Things are a-hoppin' at the LBC, with Jeff Bryant proclaiming his passion for the book he nominated for this term, Sideshow by Sidney Thompson and me singing the praises of my nominee, Manbug by George K. Ilsley. Of course, Sam Savage's Firmin was the book that got the most votes, and it's a fun book well worth your attention, but don't neglect the other two, either.

(And no, even though Jeff, Ed, and I are known in certain circles as The Boyz of the LBC, we did not agree beforehand only to choose books with one-word titles written by men.)