Underworld.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.