A Momentary Miscellany

I still don't have time to write a substantive post about much of anything, but there are a bunch of things I'd like to note before I forget them, so here's a rather fragmentary and scattered post about things mostly unrelated to each other...

I've been doing quite a bit of writing, but none of it is stuff that's currently for online venues. (For instance, I wrote an introduction to an upcoming art book from Hideaki Miyamura, about which I'm sure I will say much more later, once it's available.) Also, I sold a story to Steve Berman for an upcoming anthology of queer Poe stories, which is very exciting for me because I've hardly written any fiction in the last 2 years, and whenever I finally get around to writing a story, I always wonder, "Do I still remember how?" Apparently, yes. I'm also thrilled because I've had a chance to read a couple other stories that will be in the book and they're really excellent — honestly, even if you're indifferent to Poe and you think you only like your stories 100% hetero in their inclinations, you should get this book. (And not just because 100% hetero is so dull you should never talk about it in mixed company. But I'm not judging you. Actually, I am. Unless you read this book when it comes out next year...)

Speaking of coming out soon, we're almost ready to release a new issue of The Revelator. For a preview of what's to come, check out our Facebook page. It's even possible that we will manage to get two whole issues out within the next 12 months, doubling our current rate! A lot depends on our Copy Editor, but we've got faith.

Short Notes on Various Books

One thing I love about blogs is seeing people discover books that have become so much a part of my own life that I develop the sense that everybody else on Earth has also read them, and so there's no need for me to talk about them, because we all know these are great books, right? It's nice to be reminded that this is a fantasy -- nice to see people suddenly fall in love with books I've known for a little while already.

The great and glorious Anne Fernald just posted a list of some books she's read lately with joy and happiness, and the two books on the list that I've read are ones I recommend without reservation: Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.

I first heard about Tropical Fish when I was in Kenya for the SLS/Kwani conference and Doreen Baingana was part of a panel discussion; I found her captivating. Later, a Ugandan friend (who also told me about FEMRITE) exhorted me to read the book. I did. I exhort you to do the same.

I don't remember when I stumbled upon Good Morning, Midnight -- I feel like the battered, crumpled paperback I've got has been with me for years, but I know I read it only a handful of years ago. Few other books have affected the prose of my own writing as deeply. Much of what I've written, and even some of what I've published, I could call my pre-Rhys writing -- aspiring toward a sort of lyricism that now I have little interest in. Good Morning, Midnight offers, to my eye's ear, a prose that I would rank in its stark, precise beauty with that of Paul Bowles, J.M. Coetzee, and even, to some extent, Beckett.

Meanwhile, much like Anne, I've been reading a lot without writing about it. I've felt like I either didn't have much to say about what I've read, or what I'd have to say has already been said by plenty of people. Here, though, are some quick thoughts on some of what I've read over the last few weeks:

I was looking forward to Jedediah Berry's first novel, The Manual of Detection, with so much excitement that I may have slaughtered it with expectations. Some of Jed's short stories are among my favorites of recent years, and I had high hopes for the novel, but those hopes were never quite met. It was a brisk and sometimes exhilarating read, but ultimately felt whispy to me, especially in the last third, from which I ached for much more. Much more what? I don't know. But more.

Similarly, I think Brian Evenson is one of the better contemporary American writers, and so my hopes for his new novel, Last Days, were unreasonably high. It's an interesting and sometimes harrowing book, but again I wasn't satisfied with it in the last third or so. (Matt Bell has written a comprehensive and thoughtful take on the novel here.) It's not that I didn't like either The Manual of Detection or Last Days -- I read them both, and neither ever really felt like a slog to get through -- but both left me unsatisfied, yearning for more complexity and depth and nuance and implication.

Then one day the mail brought both The Letters of Noël Coward and The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940. I wondered what the mail gods were trying to tell me (one friend replied, when I mentioned the coincidence: "I think it means you are either: an absurd gayist ... or a flamboyant abusrdist. Possibly both." I'll try for both). The Coward was a review copy, the Beckett a book I splurged on for myself. I tried reading the former for a bit, because I do have a certain weakness for good ol' Noël, but the letters are presented amidst a narrative of Coward's life, and I found it annoying, so couldn't continue.

The Beckett is a masterpiece of editing, a feat of scholarship, and utterly fascinating. I devoured half of the big book in only a few days (then stopped, ready to go again on the second half very soon). Gabriel Josipovici reviewed it, so I have nothing else to say.

Partly because of my "Murder, Madness, Mayhem" class, I happened to read some Robert Aickman stories and became obsessed. I had last read Aickman when I was about 17 or so, and I had hated his stories. I thought they were the most boring, pointless things ever written by any human being ever, ever, ever. Ahhh, youth! "The Hospice" and "The Stains" are now stories I am simply in awe of. I quickly hunted up the only two relatively affordable Aickman collections available on the used book market: Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils. They are full of exactly what Aickman says they are full of: strange stories. Beautifully, alarmingly strange stories.

Someone should publish an affordable paperback of Aickman's selected (or, be still my heart, collected!) stories. Tartarus Press published a two-volume collected stories, but it's going for at least $700 these days, and though I love Aickman, I can't spend $700 on him. Thus, I implore the publishing world to relieve my yearning and reprint a collection or two or eight of Aickman's stories in inexpensive editions! Someone? Anyone? Please? NYRB Books, I'm looking at you right now.....

Wanting to read some nonfiction about Aickman, I borrowed S.T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction from a library and read the fairly astute chapter on Aickman. But I have to admit, my first thought on reading various parts of Joshi's book was, "What crawled up this guy's ass and died?" I know some people have thought the same about things I've written, so I didn't hold it against him. I was curious how Joshi is perceived within the horror community, though, because his rants against writers like Stephen King and Peter Straub seem so over-the-top to me that they actually work better as humor than as criticism, and he sometimes seems to get angry at writers for not fitting into his own narrow categories, for not agreeing with his (Lovecraftian) view of the universe, for not being more, well, Joshian. He has some fascinating things to say, but also ... not. Is he the Ezra Pound of genre criticism? The Cimmerian quotes Joel Lane (whose short stories I like quite a bit):

[Joshi's] Lovecraft biography is a serious classic. Joshi’s recent book The Modern Weird Tale is a mixed bag, highly idiosyncratic and unfair, but full of good insights. His new book The Evolution of the Weird Tale, despite its grand title, is basically a collection of review articles; but it’s enormous fun and less narrow than some earlier Joshi stuff. The Weird Tale, published in 1990 and covering the weird fiction genre from Machen to Lovecraft, is ambitious and dynamic but heavy-handed and too fond of extreme statements. Behind the veils of academic objectivity, Joshi can be seen to be a volatile, short-tempered, aggressive and highly intense young man. He has mellowed a little since, though his sarcasm can still wither at forty paces.

As I prepared my class to watch an episode of Dexter, I read around in Jack the Ripper and the London Press by L. Perry Curtis, Jr. and Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture by David Schmid -- both well worth reading, rich with insights.

Nowadays, I'm mostly doing research about British imperialism and its connection to mystery and adventure fiction. Fascinating stuff, which will, I hope, bring a new project to fruition...

More Blather from Moi

As if my previous post were not enough, I now present an interview with me, conducted by Nita Noveno of the Sunday Salon. (It actually repeats some of what I said in the post below, because the interview was part of what brought some of those ideas to the foreground of my consciousness and let them nag.)

Nita and I first met in Kenya in December 2006, and then I got to read at the Sunday Salon this past February. We realized then that we hadn't had much chance to chat, so we went out for tea one day, and Nita kept asking me questions about science fiction. She apparently found my answers in some way or another interesting, and asked if we could try to replicate our conversation via email. And voilá, an interview!

A Night Out

I hadn't been out to the theatre in a while, but the marvelous Liz G. had a spare ticket to Next to Normal at Second Stage Theatre, and so I took her up on her offer of a night out. I doubted I would care much for the play, but it's been a few months since I've seen a live stage production, and my addiction is deep enough that I was in severe withdrawal.

My problem when I see new plays is that I tend to blame all faults on the script. I first noticed this back in college when I was reviewing for NYU's Washington Square News, every new (and generally painfully awful) play seemed to me to suffer from atrociously cliched and/or banal and/or pretentious and/or halfbaked and/or insipid scripts. In a city where so many actors, designers, and directors go perpetually unemployed, it was rare to see a show that was particularly badly acted, directed, or designed. Or it may be that my own focus on playwrighting caused and causes me to locate faults in the area I know best.

In any case, once again, I thought most of the problems with the show were at the basic level of the script (well, libretto, lyrics, and music in this case). The actors didn't seem quite warmed up in the first ten minutes or so, but once they found their footing, they performed with real precision and intensity, which is what made the play bearable for me -- much as I liked the idea of a musical about a manic-depressive woman and her family, the story was so predictable and uninspired, so sentimental and cloyingly movie-of-the-week in its development that it's a wonder I found the experience of watching it basically painless and occasionally pleasurable. While certainly some of the pleasure did come from scripted moments -- if he can repress his schmaltzy tendencies, Brian Yorkey has the potential to be an extraordinary lyricist, since a few of the songs have clever and affecting lines -- most came from the sheer energy of the actors, all of whom throw themselves into the material with more gusto than it deserves.

The last play I saw directed by Michael Greif was Rent, a show I basically loathe (for many reasons), though the slickness of direction that bothered me so much with Rent works better here, with a story of upper-middle-class anxiety. The set is the sort of scaffolding thing that was new and interesting in the '60s, but it works well enough here, and is served particularly well by Kevin Adams's lighting. The costume design is contemporary, of course, and the characters go through an awful lot of outfits -- the actor in me was cringing at the amount of quick-changes.

As we were talking about the show, Liz and I started wondering about the audiences that producers of new musicals must be trying to reach. It's nice to see a musical where the characters sing lines with the sort of profanity that everybody uses casually these days, but it's strange that the music sounds like it was written in the late '70s -- really, many of the songs could easily pass themselves off as trunk tunes from Neil Diamond or Anne Murray. Meanwhile, the story is one that is probably dear to the hearts of suburbanites: family dysfunction, lots of pills, kids who are over-pressured to get into Yale and so end up doing lots of pills themselves, etc. From a producer's standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to put such a show on the boards, because the audience that is going to pay $80 for a ticket to a play in NY is the kind of audience that is likely to have good memories of Neil Diamond and Anne Murray songs and is worried about all the prescriptions in the medicine cabinet. Indeed, the audience at Next to Normal seemed to truly love the show, and quite a few people gave it a standing ovation. (I don't say this as a criticism, merely an observation. Some of my best friends have fond memories of Neil Diamond and Anne Murray songs and have way too many prescriptions in their medicine cabinets. They, too, deserve musicals.)

The sad effect of all this on the American theatre is that it makes something like Threepenny Opera, a play that will reach the 80th anniversary of its premiere this summer, seem breathtakingly radical still.

But it was good to get out to the theatre again, something I need to do more often. (I'm sad that Soho Rep's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted has been postponed to October -- I had been looking forward to seeing it this spring.)

Liz brought me goodies, too, which made me tremendously happy, including the manuscript of a new novel by a writer whose first book excited me quite a bit and copies of The SFWA European Hall of Fame and the late, great Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends, a book that is an utter delight and belongs in every household. Really.

Now I must head off to more peregrinations and intemperate thoughts, some of which I am certain I shall share. Until then...