Eject!

As a Machine and Parts by Caleb J. Ross.

2011-12-15T07:04:00.004-05:00

Author and internet cool dude Caleb J. Ross has a new book.
As a Machine and Parts, available from Aqueous Books, can be purchased now. Click the link and do so.

From Caleb: [The] book incorporates subtle illustrations, formatting plays, and typography twists to create a story that is both bizarre and human. Though, how else could a book about a man turning into a machine--and not really caring about it--be written?

Sounds like fun to me. Visit Caleb's site to learn more: As a Machine and Parts.

Christmas.

2011-12-06T12:56:00.007-05:00

Christmas-- it's here. Basically. What's on my list? I'll share it with you:

Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid box set: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions) – Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
Dracula (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Bram Stoker
H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – H.P. Lovecraft
Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Oscar Wilde
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Mark Twain
Fog Gorgeous Stag – Sean Lovelace
Four For A Quarter: Fictions – Michael Martone
Scorch Atlas – Blake Butler
Dear Everybody – Michael Kimball
Stranger Will – Caleb J. Ross
Valis – Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition – Frank Herbert
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text – William S. Burroughs
Kicking Horse Cliffhanger Espresso (Whole Bean)
Fancy-Shmancy Mustard of All Varieties
Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
Space Oddity – David Bowie
Scary Monsters – David Bowie
It’s Complicated Being a Wizard – Portugal. The Man
Pink Moon – Nick Drake

Now, let's make some observations. This list betrays a terrible secret-- I do not yet own "Stranger Will" by Caleb Ross. My only explanation is that I am a prick and care for no one but myself, though I will nonetheless go on to defend myself by saying that A) it's on my list, and B) this endless Nabokov book has ground all literary purchases to a halt for me. I have not bought a book in months. MONTHS. Okay? Even when Borders was going out of business, all I came away with was Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger because it was like, a dollar. It's nothing personal. I fully expect Caleb's book to be excellent, which is why it's on my list. Notice it's in good company. Notice who's NOT on the list-- Nabokov. Therefore it is scientific fact: Caleb is better than Nabokov.

Also, what's with all the David Bowie? I don't know. It occurred to me that I don't own any David Bowie albums, and that seems wrong, so I picked a few at random.

"It's Complicated Being A Wizard" was a title that made me laugh. And I've heard Portugal. The Man is good, but I don't own any of their stuff, mostly because I despise the period in the name of the band. It ruins any sentence in which you mention them (like the previous one), so I've resisted up until now. But the name of this blog has an exclamation point in it, you say? Well for one thing, no one ever mentions this blog, so that's not a problem. Furthermore, stylistic use of an exclamation point is less subliminal and does not look quite so misplaced in the middle of a thought. If they were looking for some alternative characters in their name, why not Portugal & The Man? That really adds a 1987-CBS-primetime-Wednesday-lineup feel to their name that's pretty killer.

Caleb J. Ross Wants to Write with the Intellectual Charm of a Mid-90s Family Sitcom.

2011-10-21T08:19:00.009-04:00

This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross (also known as Caleb Ross, to people who hate Js) as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb

Does anyone else remember Steve Urkel’s personality changing machine? For those who don’t, here’s the ridiculously brilliant premise:

TV nerd poster child, Steve Urkel, is madly in love with neighbor girl named Laura. Despite, or perhaps because of, the strange absence of his own family (strange only to the audience; I don’t believe the show ever addressed the missing family directly) the neighbor family treated Steve as a pariah, often going out of their way to express hatred for the poor kid. Quite often, episode story-lines hinged on the family’s eventual, yet always temporary, acceptance of the outcasted child. But, when Steve steps into his personality changing machine, shifting from hunched geek to smooth chic (with an equally sexified name: Stefan Urquelle) the world suddenly makes time for him. Laura loves him. The family loves him. The simple lesson: looks are everything.

Does anyone else wonder why the government didn’t seize that machine immediately? No, you don’t. The machine integrated into the Family Matters world as a perfect figurative and literal storytelling device.

That’s the fiction I strive to write. Conceptually heavy, yet contextually believable. The entire show’s premise during those episodes depended on how this single awkward element transformed the entire Family Matters world. There is a magical realism feel to this situation, in that the weird element is weird only to the audience; the characters don’t consider anything strange at all (or they are willfully ignorant to the strangeness).

Unrelated True Thoughts.

2011-10-04T18:10:00.008-04:00

1) Salmon is a great food. If kittens were food, they would be salmon.

2) One of my favorite books of poetry is "Rose" by Li-Young Lee:

Out of the grave
my father's hair
bursts. A strand
pierces my left sole, shoots
up bone, past ribs,
to the broken heart it stiches,
then down,
swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down,
through the right foot.

--Dreaming of Hair

3) Back to salmon-- this salmon is like falling apart on my fork.

4) I was riding my bike at the park. I was wearing a hood against the cold and thus my vision was restricted. A girl was walking too close to a goose that had its beak buried into its feathers, and it snapped at her. She danced away screaming. I witnessed this, and as I rode past, I was forced to turn my entire head to continue to monitor the amusing scene. Having turned my head so obviously in her direction, I felt compelled to speak. Laughing, I said, "Be careful." I said it in a way that I meant to sound fatherly but, in my own head, sounded somehow creepy and unwelcome. Though I could not see my own eyes I perceived them as being teary and slit. Possibly reddened. Was it creepy? No, No. I rode away. I don't speak to strangers often. I don't know why I did today. Perhaps I felt safe inside my hood.

The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and Other Cheerful Topics.

2011-09-30T08:44:00.027-04:00

So, I am thigh deep in this monstrous collection of Nabokov's stories. I had read "Despair" somewhere in a previous life, and had enjoyed it well enough to never read Nabokov again. This is not mean as a criticism-- I used to be something of a masochist when it came to reading, in that, if I found something I liked, I generally read nothing else from that author. The exceptions were Douglas Adams and Chuck Palahniuk; the former because Adams's work was a childhood friend to me (and a grown-up friend as well, which is a rare treat-- I was disappointed to find that He-Man did not age as well as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"); the latter, because I went to college during the Age of Palahniuk, and if you weren't reading Palahniuk you weren't cool. And let me tell you: I was cool with a capital "K." (As a side note, I bet you're wondering if Nabokov relates to He-Man in any meaningful way; you will be pleased to know he does, and the matter will be addressed with bracing insight in my completely fictional doctoral thesis, "Nabokov, He-Man, and Yevtushenko's So-Called Clatter of Surgical Tools: Manhood and the Aesthetic Structure in Modern Media.")

But anyway again. These short stories are brutally weighty and depressing. Weighty in an existential way; depressing in a good way. "Terra Incognita" is my favorite so far-- the story of a doomed jungle expedition and the associated abandonments, violence, and illness. There are some fun games here with perception and ontology, if one knew what that word meant, and had subsequently used it properly. Nabokov only needs about five pages to destroy you. It's a subdued, lyrical destruction though-- a lovely autopsy of reality. The knife in this story does not rip or tear or any of that. It is a rusty blade that enters unseen and by the time you register it, it's done with.

What happens in the story? Everyone dies. I hope I'm not ruining it for you. Let me, in fact, ruin all of Nabokov's short fiction for you: everyone dies. That's not literally true of course-- some people improbably survive-- but it might as well be. Death is the overarching detail that seems to float to the surface in the 30 or so stories I've read so far. Oh, a more critical and worthy eye would find a myriad of more fascinating themes and parallels, but I am not reading this to dissect it so much as enjoy it (Nabokov himself would've been a fan of this approach). I haven't read enough (read: any other) Russian literature so as to be able to say "It's very Russian" without being supercilious, but what the hell-- life's short and you probably know what I mean anyway. This is very Russian. Blammo. Checkmate.

I've been reading the stories here and there over a period of months, and have just about hit the halfway mark. I've been reading as the opportunities arise-- in the bathroom, while waiting to have my teeth cleaned, sitting at the local Subway on my lunch hour-- and am further convinced that the short story is my favorite form. Novels are great; but this is a 65-course meal.

EDIT: "Perfection" is now possibly my favorite story so far. If you happen to read the story, and want to gallop farther along the Reading Rainbow, here's a nice critical breakdown:

Behind the Glass Pane: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Perfection” and Transcendence

DOUBLE EDIT: Only read this comment if you've read the story so I don't ruin it for you. Waiting...waiting for you to finish the story...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...done? Okay, so what did I tell you before? The guy dies. Everyone dies.

So Long, Abjective.

2011-08-05T16:41:00.002-04:00

Since the kiddies may be reading, I'll keep this clean: shitballs. Abjective is done publishing. I am very sad to see it go, though I hope the circumstances were benign-- i.e. there was no massive fire, or website foreclosure, or abduction, etc. Lots of amazing fiction came and went over in those parts.

Went-- no, that's the wrong word. It implies that the fiction is gone-- it remains! Explore the archive:

Abjective.

Thanks for the memories.

BULL!

2011-04-26T13:31:00.011-04:00

What do you think of when you think of independent men's fiction? Dockers(r) brand pants, of course.

There's this thing where, if you have a Facebook account, you can vote for indie publisher BULL (fiction for thinking men). If they win, they get some bank. $100K of bank. That's a lot of bank.

Anyway, in order to do this, you have to first "Like" Dockers(r) brand pants. Don't worry, it's all there in the below link. I know, it's a total pain in the ass, but this is what we've done to our planet and so now we have to make do by indirectly selling one another pants. It may leave a nasty taste in your mouth to tangentially become a marketing pawn, but, since I assume BULL will not be devoted (solely) to pants-adoring literature, I think it's a worthy bit of pride swallowing.

Anyway, give BULL a hell of a nice start and vote for their plan here: http://apps.facebook.com/dockerswearthepants/entries/21891.

Vote once a day, every day. If you love pants like I do you'll do it.

Closed Garage Door.

2011-04-26T10:17:00.003-04:00

I love this: Closed Garage Door by Allison Carter. It's at 5_Trope.

Am I supposed to use the underscore? I'd hate to look the fool.

Inherent Vice.

2011-04-08T15:08:00.010-04:00

I've read some Pynchon in the past-- some, meaning:

1) I have opened "Gravity's Rainbow" approximately three times while sitting on the toilet, read three sentences per visit, and decided that this was obscenely optimistic bathroom reading
2) "Slow Learner."
3) "V." Though to be honest I don't think I finished it. In college I was terrible about abandoning books halfway through

This book is less Pynchon-y than any of those, though it's still crammed with characters who sometimes seem to exist chiefly to be branded with a kooky name (Jason Velveeta) and then disappear. I haven't finished the book yet-- about 60 pages left-- but, if all these characters intend to return, the final pages are going to be like watching an extravagance of weirdos and paranoiacs endlessly disembarking a clown car.

I'm not a huge fan of noir, and a first-timer to hippie noir, if that's even a recognizable genre, but this book-- for all its weirdness and whimsy-- has actually been quite a bit of fun so far. If you can tolerate an eccentric dentist/suspected ne'er-do-well operating from inside a building shaped like a giant golden tooth and later suffering a serious accident on a trampoline, last seen in the presence of a car full of potheads driven by a-- okay, so that's what we're dealing with.

Anyway, I thought it would grate on me. The 60s are not being defined by the writing; little is being made in the way of sinister, braided social commentary, which is possibly what I was expecting. It's more like a costume party. Breezy. Drug-addled. But I'm glad I carried on. The plot is coming together, against all odds. Probably my favorite Pynchon so far, so far.

"Victimized" by Richard Thomas.

2011-04-05T15:58:00.006-04:00

Writer and all-around cool guy Richard Thomas has self-published a story entitled Victimized. It's aimed at the neo-noir crowd-- those who enjoyed his novel "Transubtantiate" will certainly dig the vibe. Get "Victimized" on the cheap:

For the Amazon Kindle store version, go here.
For Nook and every other eReader, get it at Smashwords here.

Stranger Will.

2011-03-22T22:28:00.005-04:00

Caleb Ross's "Stranger Will" shall now be purchased by you:

A few months ago Caleb ran a contest where people could vote on the cover of the book-- this is the one I voted for. I hope that's not breaking internet-book-cover-voting-contest etiquette by revealing my vote. Anyway, I dig the cover, and I got a solid introduction to this book in a workshop setting a few years ago. It was a blast back then. I can't wait to jump back in and see the final product.

Here's a link to Caleb's website.

"They've built their nests..."

2011-01-24T16:42:00.002-05:00

...in the chimneys of my heart, those swallows that you lost."

Reading "Another Roadside Attraction." I've read Tom Robbins before, but I never considered him one to risk a passage so nakedly romantic. Or am I misunderstanding it? Maybe the all his shenanigans are simply covering that vulnerability. There was, you know, the whole Bernard Mickey Wrangle/Princess Leigh-Cheri lovefest. If "Love" is the appropriate word. Infatuation. Maybe the shenanigans are in service of it. Maybe I'm clinging to the wrong piece of driftwood.

Anyway, it's been a long time since I've read "Still Life With Woodpecker," and I was in a different frame of mind then. So I might be misinterpreting things. But anyhoo. This moved me.

Out of Touch.

2011-01-10T20:58:00.007-05:00

I review Brandon Tietz's forthcoming novel Out of Touch here. Click, and enjoy.

When you're done clicking and enjoying, purchase it from the intersphere, perhaps here. Here as well.

This post is abbreviated because my hands are cold and I've been typing for a while now and my thermostat is set @ 59 degrees because I am cheap and I am afraid the world will run out of fossil fuels and I'm not having that on my head, no sir.

How Some People Like Their Eggs.

2011-01-06T10:55:00.004-05:00

Received a copy of How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace for Christmas. A truly thoughtful gift! I can't recommend it highly enough. Especially the title story, which, appropriately, and amusingly, and beautifully, details how some people like their eggs. General Patton, in particular, delighted me.

It's not an easy thing, being able to transplant yourself so readily into another's skin, even for a paragraph. I had no doubt I was inside Patton's mind. Or at least the caricature of Patton's mind. I read this passage aloud to people who will sit still long enough to be enraptured. If they fail to be enraptured, they are clods and I have no use for them. It is cruel, but life is cruel. Buy this book.

By the way, Happy New Year. And Merry Christmas. And Happy Thanksgiving. And Happy Halloween. And Happy Birthday to: Monica Bellucci; Mark Hamill; Xzibit; Evan Rachel Wood; myself.

Dream War.

2010-09-28T11:48:00.001-04:00

Review of Stephen Prosapio's genre thriller Dream War up @ Oxyfication.

Transubstantiate, epilogue.

2010-08-05T11:29:00.003-04:00

Finished up Richard Thomas' Transubstantiate recently-- my review is up over @ Oxyfication.

The book was a great time. Very fast, very kinetic, very bloody, very noir. It's a testament to his skill that the book is as easy to read as it is, because the structure is actually quite complicated. It's a shadowy journey, and while Richard holds his mysteries quite close to the vest, you're never lost. A dark, devilish tale.

Transubstantiate has arrived.

2010-07-01T08:55:00.004-04:00

Richard Thomas' book Transubstantiate is now available from Otherworld Publications!

Buy it now.

Transubstantiate -- right around the corner.

2010-06-29T13:11:00.005-04:00

Transubstantiate, the neo-noir debut from Richard Thomas, is almost here. Two days. My copy's ordered; is yours? Visit his blog, What Does Not Kill Me, or the Transubstantiate home page for all the juicy details. More to come!

Jose Saramago.

2010-06-18T10:02:00.004-04:00

Farewell to the great Jose Saramago, who has passed away. "Blindness" is by far one of my favorite books, and a great example of uncompromising style. The same way "A Clockwork Orange" conditions you to learn a new language, "Blindness" conditions you to read in a new way-- your trusted senses are discarded as you encounter blocks of unattributed text, text without punctuation, etc. All signposts have been removed, yet you still find your way. Eventually, you come to trust your instincts. It is an amazing experience.

It's tough to lose someone you admire. These people become like family members in a way. It can be tough to take, but we are lucky enough to have their body of work to treasure, and to pass on to future generations. Incomplete as it always seems to feel.

The Road.

2010-06-03T10:13:00.003-04:00

About a hundred pages in to Cormac's "The Road." I have been warned there is no light at the end of this drab tunnel. Though I wonder. My idea of redemption is that it is so miniscule, dirt-smeared and fragile that I may well find it where it does not exist, whenever I choose to find it. This is the "buried gun" approach to redemption: when you feel the misery is endless and you can't persist, just find the spot where you buried your salvation, and be saved. (Is salvation, then, a gun? Is salvation suicide? Oh, bleak world. There are already rumblings of suicide in the text. It's out there unseen, like the strange, far-off concussions the man and woman heard in the night. The notion of release from torment.)

It doesn't concern me either way, though, as I find there is something uplifting about misery that dares to be interminable. It allows you to be the author of your own philosophy, as opposed to being fed someone else's. That's what I've always enjoyed about McCarthy-- he doesn't force feed you anything. He gives you not necessarily the world as it is, but a brutal magnification that tests you. The idea of being tested-- being given a task-- is perhaps hinted at in the book's title-- the idea of being unmoored, and set on your way to discover if you're made of anything, or if you're destined to be nothing but a pile ash.

LOST (spoilers).

2010-05-25T08:30:00.006-04:00

So-- LOST is done.

I was a late arrival to the party, watching seasons 1 - 5 on Netflix streaming this past winter, and much of season 6 on Hulu. I watched the finale as it aired on ABC, commandeering my parents' living room for four and a half hours, since I do not get cable at my house. I've found my tolerance for commercial breaks has dropped to nearly zero.

So, by gorging myself all at once I was able to devour the series in ravenous chunks, not having to endure the incubation periods of days and weeks in between mysteries during which a traditional viewer might hatch his hairbrained theories as to what was actually going on on the island. I don't know if this was beneficial or not; I don't have a frame of reference. I do know that I enjoyed seasons 1 - 5 immensely, and was sad to see it all come to an end.

My thoughts on that ending: I was not disappointed. The series was built on mystery, and many of those mysteries remained intact, if a little jumbled. When the writers made attempts to reward the viewers' tenacity and explain certain things, the show tended to suffer from it. It's rarely as fun to know as it is to guess.

Some of the finale felt a bit rushed. Locke's recovery for example, though I suppose you could attribute this to the uncertain physics of Limbo. Emotionally, however, I felt the need to see Locke's faith somehow redeemed in the real world; he was a long-suffering character, broken like the rest, but I felt that despite his talk of being special and having a purpose, Locke's role was simply to be used. As he was murdered a few seasons back, for example, Locke's last thoughts were, "I don't understand."

Overall, a series finale is a bit perfunctory in nature. If it entertains and keeps the spirit of the show alive, I think it has done its job. I was happy to have been given a chance to see these characters on their way.

Jack's end was poetic and heartfelt, if a little lonely. I was satisfied with his having to die alone, in that the character had learned to let go-- much of the show was concerned with inherent flaws; the "clean slate" the characters were given in the first season was an illusion. No one can leave his past behind. In fact, Jack found that out shortly after he'd said it as he found himself chasing his dead father through the jungle. That he eventually learned to accept that whatever happened happened and move on was fitting.

Still, the overall philosophy of the show was often difficult to pin down, but considering the ways that Jack and Locke ultimately left the earthly realm, the show's final message struck me as surprisingly bold in its fatalism. I would be tempted to say that this was kind of an exasperated, nuclear reset of the show's themes-- a result of the writers' inability to wrangle the myriad of philosophies, plot points, and themes they had introduced; tempted, if it weren't for the fact that this was so personally satisfying to me. As a whole, the final vision of the show is of an ultimately unknowable world and a character's subsequent passing from it. Pieces can be discovered, but how often do we understand the full scope of things? How often do you get to rest? There is always one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, until you're dead. I find this to be rather sublime. Rose and Bernard's continued existence in the story is the only clue that this was intentional; they had let go of it all a long, long time ago, and their lives looked pretty good to me. Someone who might find Jack's lonely Zen to be unfitting is probably the type that still identifies with Locke's restless hunger in earlier seasons. I was one; but when I realized what it earned him, I suppose I started to drift. Locke was no more enlightened than Jack.

I am not naive enough to believe that all the show's unanswered questions were left unanswered on purpose. Part of this adventure was sleight of hand. Some of the fun of writing is retrofitting the mess you've made with themes that develop naturally from your interests, your values, and your sensibilities. That certain mysteries of the island were never "solved" is probably more a function of the show's simply reaching its end before the writers were forced to deal with loose ends. Not a problem, as far as I'm concerned. The mysteries of the island-- striking as many of them were-- were often placed as secondary. Earlier, anyway. Later, it became necessary to try and strike a better balance. Things then tipped in the other direction for a while, and the island and its mythology took center stage. I think the back-and-forth is a good representation of what people go through in their lives: too often we're swallowed by the details of our maddening world. Rarely can we escape.

I am sad to see such an ambitious show come to an end. It didn't always hit its mark, but I am glad to have taken the trip.

Click.

2010-04-30T13:21:00.011-04:00

Read this some time ago, but it's always worth mentioning, since Another Sky Press does good things: Click. It's by Kristopher Young. A total brainfuck, this one. You'll love it. And you can read it online. No, really. You can. But buy the manuscript too. Because anyone can float pixels, but a thing on paper is a thing with weight, both literally and even spiritually. I cannot explain the universe; I only receive mail there. Enjoy!

The Grifted.

2010-04-22T09:59:00.026-04:00

I can't remember the source-- someone on Facebook posted a link to this story @ The Collagist (I'm thinking it was either Richard Thomas or Christopher Dwyer, though I could be wrong). The story's called The Grifted by Jac Jemc, and it's a cool, cryptic, noir-ish tale. One interpretation is that the narrator is passing into a none-too-cozy afterlife; another interpretation is that there is no interpretation-- only the reality, and whatever you bring to the table. The compelling oddness of the story naturally makes people want to "figure it out." It's likely there is a a "true" interpretation of the story. It also doesn't matter in the slightest. This phenomenon of plasticity reminds me of the films of David Lynch (in general); furthermore, it reminds me of David Lynch the personality-- or, more specifically, facets of his personality in terms of the meta-marketing campaign he launched with the release of his film Inland Empire. That whole bit with the cow.

For those unfamiliar with David Lynch's cow, here's a brief explanation (credited to Joshy Tyler, 2006):

Apparently bovines are [Lynch's] new method of self-distributing his films. The Mullholland Drive director tells The Hollywood Reporter he's sick of studios and will now distribute his movies himself. To do it, he'll embark on a ten city tour to promote [Inland Empire], using only cattle and a folding chair. "I ate a lot of cheese during the film, and it made me happy," he explains. "I'm hoping the Academy members will be sick of 10 million trade ads and appreciate something a bit different." Cows are certainly different. I'll give him that. Accompanying Lynch and his moo-buddy will be Pianist Mark Zebrowski, who will play "Polish night music" from Inland Empire.

Yeah. So. There's David Lynch and his cow. The whole non-sequitur about the cheese might strike you as a kind of a toss-away eccentricity (it sort of is), but to me it speaks of the way that language has a lot of ground to cover in conveying complex thoughts or ideas; to me, he's atttempting to convey several things at once: first, that A) cheese made him happy; B) happiness is a sort of transitory, simple thing, sometimes as simple as a taste-- a kind of butterfly of an emotion, landing here, landing there; C) the nested idea that his conveying of the above sentiments in connection with the promotion of his film is an attempt to convey both the simplicity of such a chance pleasure (the eating of cheese) and the fact that that pleasure is, in all reality, completely unrelated to the film itself, thereby implying that the relationship between the cow and the promotion of Inland Empire is just as valid as Lynch's enjoyment of cheese in concert with the filming of his latest movie. He's an alchemist, trying to conjure depth from disharmony.

Why all this talk of cheese and David Lynch's cow? Someone has to talk about it. But aside from that, I see parallels between Lynch's cunning oddness and Jemc's story. I'm no David Lynch expert. I like the man's films, but I don't know much about him as a person outside the context of his work. I don't know what it says about me that I find his concept of marketing his films with a cow in tow to be somehow completely sensible in terms of the human experience of creating art, but I get a similar sensation in reading Jac Jemc's story The Grifted. Sometimes, people try to apply sense where there is no call for sense: only feeling.

Ubik.

2010-04-19T11:14:00.004-04:00

So, finished Ubik-- interesting. Odd book. Always nice to experience a quick read. I hadn't reading anything by Philip K. Dick before, and I guess from having seen a few movies based on his work I expected something more dystopian. I mean, there were certainly elements of it (the largely coin-operated society, the semi-conscious dead having their identities mingled in half-life moratoriums), but those elements seemed to take a back seat to a sort of odd procedural, not unlike the process by which one accepts death-- there is the incident, then the sense of futility, then a blossoming understanding as one comes to terms with a new reality. The nature of half-life in the story proposed an interesting twist-- that we not only have to accept and experience the deaths of loved ones, but we must make similar sense of our own deaths as well. In real time, no less. There is also an element of rebirth. One is forced to wonder if this is a hint at infinity; if death, death again, and rebirth are accepted facts, why fear anything that happens?

The final ten or twenty pages are excellent. Cryptic non-ending that erases all solid ground. In fact, on second thought, there is not a safe place to stand during this whole story. The final suggestion is one of endlessly nested realities; one wonders if these are nothing but the catacombs of the half-dead mind.

Underworld.

2010-03-31T11:41:00.006-04:00

Back a couple of months ago I read Don DeLillo's Underworld. Over @ Oxyfication we had a discussion on the book. Sort of. I should say we discussed a few chapters. But as the book chugged onward my stamina for the discussion fell, possibly from carrying Underworld's sheer weight day in and day out. And for a person who suffers from sometimes paralyzing eye strain (my life is all screens, pretty much all the time, interspersed with occasional trips to some far-off beach to confirm that nature does indeed still exist in some primeval form) I soldiered on pretty well. I finished the book and summarized as best I could. It was easy to get lost inside the chapters. While I enjoyed the book immensely, I naively did not anticipate how difficult it would be to actually discuss such a multi-faceted tome. It would be like discussing the universe, in a way. A meaningful dissection would probably be as long as the book itself.

Now I'm re-reading it. Sort of. It truly is a wonder. It transitions so easily across such a long timeline. It moves effortlessly among a host of characters. It teases. It tastes. It's honest and huge. Did I mention it's huge?

I think my favorite sections are those involving Lenny Bruce. How real they feel. How incredibly exactly perfect and riveting and real. The stage-hush, the outrage, the frenetic talk, the daring observations. These sections represent for me the heart of the book, in a way. Lenny Bruce holds sleepless vigil over the endless depths of twentieth century dread. The rest of the characters just live it. They grapple with it largely in private, in the abstract. Lenny Bruce tries to make it tangible, and does so in public, on stage, his claustrophobia on display. He's buried alive inside it. Pounding on the coffin lid, in a way. He craves this as much as he reviles it. Garbage and explosions and loneliness and meaning.

Random. Good book.

Transubstantiate.

2010-03-23T15:47:00.002-04:00

Richard Thomas has written a book, entitled Transubstantiate. It will be coming out through Otherworld Publications soon. More info as it comes in. Now is your opportunity to pre-order and get some hawt signed swag.

Also, forgive my absence. I've been here and there, and other places you need not know about. Last night I sat in traffic for two and a half hours because of a highway accident (I was not involved). I took this opportunity not to catch up on my reading, but to instead sing along with "Hybrid Moments" over and over and over again until my throat was raw and my Danzig was impeccable. So. No small victory there.

Random Things To Promote Mental Health.

2010-02-16T08:26:00.005-05:00

Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys uses the word simulacrum, and it made me smile because I like the word and didn't even know I liked the word until I read it in the context of Grady Tripp's father disassembling himself. Sometimes it's not stories; sometimes it's just words. Or passages. I can never get enough of that passage, reading it under the sheets like porno. Though Wonder Boys is a great book as a whole.

Bright Lights, Big City is not to be underrated. I read it once and enjoyed it; I read it again and now think it's maybe one of my favorites.

Waves, Tissue, Blood by Ben Spivey is not to be missed @ Abjective. Prose poetry like Jenga bricks. Fathers squirreling away their fortunes in Heaven, where we were always told we could not take our money, and were maybe told correctly. No one seems happy, in other words. Disintegrating and so on. Or maybe that is happiness--a state of love that's kind of meditative and vegetable in nature. Love across a distance that turns out to be infinite, as far as our lifespans are concerned.

Fight Club remains cool.

Soon comes Philip K. Dick's Ubik. A Philip with one L, he. Though I don't know many Philips to begin with, and the ones I do know I don't find myself spelling their names often.

David Foster Wallace's Signifying Nothing is both funny and horrifying in a deep and frightening way. The (still young) narrator doesn't really understand the depths of what he's angry about. He's not a writer, the narrator. It's what makes the story so powerful. It reads like a journal entry that exploded from an immature mind, capable of both pain and joy, but understanding neither.

That's all for now. President's Day was yesterday. I hope you celebrated as hard as I did.

The Story Junk Binder

2010-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

This is a guest post from Caleb J Ross, author of the chapbook Charactered Pieces: stories, as part of his ridiculously named Blog Orgy Tour. Visit his website for a full list of blog stops. Charactered Pieces: stories is currently available from OW Press (or Amazon.com). Visit Caleb at http://www.calebjross.com/.

Because Mr. Kane aims for this blog to be a literary junk drawer of sorts, let me help establish the heap with comments about my own writing miscellany, which quite literally, is how much of my writing begins: as accumulated leftovers and aborted remnants of completed pieces.

I keep a binder, scrapbooked with napkins, receipts, notebook pages, and various other cut-and-tapeable oddments, each containing scribbles that may or may not someday amount to a worthy story. The key in this accumulation is to be as uncritical about the collection as possible. Any apparently random idea that elicits even a slight pause during my otherwise monotonous life warrants a place within the binder. Anything, truly:

(head a story with a dedication to a person or thing or group that has relevance to the story – not to my own life)

(a person, after having a documentary made about his accomplishments, he refuses to be anything else for fear of not maintaining the legacy of permanence. Turns out his seclusion creates a cult of fame he never knows about)

When embarking on a new story (or am stuck with a current one), I open the binder and search for a few dissimilar snippets that may be mashed together to form a coherent story. Storytelling is about contrast and conflict. Forcing together two or more seemingly incompatible ideas allowsfor new angles and perceptions that would otherwise never happen. Physical deformity and jewelry becomes “Charactered Pieces” (the title story of my chapbook). An infatuation with documentaries and a dead brother becomes “The Camp.” Architecture and drinking camel blood becomes “The Camel of Morocco.”

My advice: keep a pen in your pocket. You can, and should, write on anything. Even all over the margins of Charactered Pieces.

from Quantum Leap

2009-12-21T13:27:00.024-05:00

Michael James Martin does some impressive things: I admit without much shame that in all my time as a reader, I have never wrapped my head around the actual math of poetry. Meter is a thing you feel, in my opinion. Do I feel comfortable recommending a poem to someone while refusing to comment on the actual mechanics of it? Of course. I don't care how a piano works; only that it produces "The Lonely Man" by Joe Harnell. As always, if you don't feel it, it doesn't much matter anyway. As such, the formula for what is a valuable piece of writing remains locked in my subconscious. Every time I try to scribble it out on the figurative chalkboard I end up distracted, and shortly find myself drawing rubber-legged stick people running for their lives from burning houses.

To summarize, Michael James Martin's poem from Quantum Leap works. It is fragmented and joyous and desperate, communicating via vignettes run amok. They spill on top of one another, separated by disorienting "leaps" from one circumstance to the next. The sense is of futility; Dr. Sam Beckett's self-imposed task was to repair what he could in any given situation. Michael James Martin wonders aloud how this scheme would operate in the real world without a screenwriter's moral (and practical) intervention. The protagonist finds himself disoriented and besieged:

Leap: I didn't accomplish anything last time, right now
a gun tastes funny-awkward on my tongue, inches from my
uvula so I'm not sure how much I'll accomplish Leap:

This is as funny as it is miserable. Is altruism an immortal quality? Does it require witnesses that know your name? How do you fall in love in the midst of madness? It's an implied question, I think; the hyper-sensitive drama of the narrator's predicament strobes at you as if narrated from the tatters of a television script run through a paper shredder. Drama would not survive on television if it were honest to this extent, at a magnification you could call molecular. It would elicit a lot of weeping and laughing and impossible-to-vocalize fear. The narrator struggles for a moment of stability. There isn't one. What better way to treat a moral protagonist than to throw him down a well with no bottom? How long does such a person last when life splits down into its insane base sensations, becoming nothing but a series of funny-awkward guns? Read from Quantum Leap by Michael James Martin @ Juked.

Charactered Pieces / Major Inversions.

2009-11-20T14:29:00.008-05:00

Major Inversions: Gordon Highland's debut novel. Dark and funny and sweet and twisted; twisted-sweet. A tale of the terrible things people become, even when they have good things in mind. Purchase it at Gordon's website.

Charactered Pieces: Caleb Ross' short story collection. I've had the pleasure of reading several of the stories in this collection (I am eager to read the rest; my copy's in the mail). Caleb's fiction is haunting and beautiful and disturbing and the opposite of timid. Un-timid? It recognizes no boundary. Like a spider loose in your walls. Purchase it at Caleb's website.

Drug Series #11: Cocaine

2009-11-19T10:35:00.011-05:00

While not his most recent, this story has wedged in me.

Sean Lovelace is a magician; his work (like all my favorite work) is unconventional and difficult to categorize. His medium is typically prose poetry, and he often works inside the conceit of a serial construction (his stories often arrive in the form of lists, brutally beautiful free associations, or dreamlike shards of narrative strung together with a common theme). It's a form I have taken some interest in lately, and Lovelace absolutely wrecks it, every time. His work is what I picture when someone says Flash Fiction-- it's economical and vivid and professionally spare. When he describes Elvis Presley's rings in Drug Series #11: Cocaine as "blazing like accordions," I stopped reading. Blazing like accordions. Blazing. Like accordions. It is the very definition of a perfect simile; the accordion is such a bulky, odd contraption-- a gaudy spectacle of an instrument that is largely incapable of subtlety. And the very use of Elvis Presley alone does a lot of heavy lifting in the context of the story; the King summons a host of associations and imagery and implied tragedy. He's his own metaphor, in a way. Safe to say, if this story doesn't do something to you, you're probably barking up the wrong tree here.

Read Drug Series #11: Cocaine by Sean Lovelace @ Barrelhouse.

Eject!

2009-11-16T21:11:00.017-05:00

I have had webpages in the past, it's true; I remember fondly my Geocities webpage from 1997 or so, the existence of which was only to lead users on a frustrating adventure through a maze of circuitous links for my own amusement. I also posted some MIDIs of songs from the "Rocky" movie series. Awe inspiring? Yes.

Webpages that followed were slightly better in most cases. And one-- the one built by Man of Many Coats Jason Heim (of multimedia zine Colored Chalk) was outstanding. Sadly it sank into the murk when I failed to renew my domain. The internet is complicated. And sad. Depression followed; then pizza. Then more depression. Then silence.

Now, I've returned with another hijacked plot of digital land on which I shall build this: Eject! I'm fashioning this to become my online junk drawer, where I shall keep all things of a literary slant that interest me. My doings, and the doings of my cohorts, will be discussed. Ad nauseam. Or whenever I feel like. Salient points will be made. Parallels drawn. I cannot promise that heads won't be exploded.

Rest assured, its not that what I hope to index here is considered junk in any sense of the word. On the contrary, I find that the junk drawer in my house actually contains the most useful stuff in the joint; it is the drawer I keep returning to. The drawer I trust. The drawer that accepts no order, yet has everything I need.

So why "Eject?" Why not "The Junk Drawer?" Because "The Junk Drawer" sounds stupid. It sounds like a place in the mall that would sell hand-knitted oven mitts or clothespin reindeer with googly eyes. And though I did in fact craft something like this in kindergarten, I'd like to put it behind us.Now I get to reverse-engineer the title of my Blog, pretending that I had some grand purpose in mind when I chose it: when I think of the word "eject," I think of a lot of things. Noise. And fire. And wind. Escape. And excitement! Maybe that's the best word choice; even utter terror is, if nothing else, exciting. A jolt, a sudden bursting upward. Chaos, exhilaration, spinning, falling. Can fear and joy exist in the same instant? Hope and despair? Why not? Before you can answer the question, you are in a controlled descent; if everything goes to plan, you arrive safely back to Earth, unscathed and shaken to the bone. And you look up at the distance you have traveled and wonder if the miracle can repeat itself without the threat of high-speed death.

I will be bold and say that it can! The best fiction blows you out of the aircraft, into the open sky. It is a gift to feel that way, and I've been keeping my thoughts on it largely to myself. Selfish-- this isn't a drug in short supply; there are talented artists dotting my radar daily, and it's their toil and trouble that richens our lives in untold ways. Some of this writing has been done by strangers; some by people I am lucky enough to know. I hope to share all of it with you.

Also, I will be peddling my own words from time to time. But enough foreplay: let us eject!