Medium: Literature

Stimulus: Josh Olsen ‒ Six Months

I half expected this book’s back cover declaration of returning to the womb every six months to refer to some transgressive trans-vaginal exploitation film scene.  The funny thing about my Rorschach reaction to the noirish packaging of Six Months is that the true meaning behind that line became the thing in this excellent book of one page stories which resonated with me most.  Instead of being a tale of sexy sadist slapstick, the title story tells of the author’s biannual returns to his hometown, which is also my hometown.

My fellow expatriate describes the sadness found in returning to La Crosse only to discover that nobody there has improved in any significant way.  The only changes to the author’s friends and family are those of age.  This saddens him in part because he can’t join in with their lack of success, that he can’t find the old camaraderie and fellowship within shared disappointments, that he can no longer be a lifer.  He’s become a visitor, and every six months he leaves the old world behind.

If I hadn’t felt exactly those things about exactly this place, “Six Months” may have simply been one more very good story.  But as I’m also filled with that same sort of self-nullified nostalgia for our hopeless hometown in western Wisconsin, the story picked up a really powerful, fascinating sense of despair.

Beyond this, Olsen fills the rest of this quick book with the sort of warped yarns that will appeal to a certain sort of man approaching middle age.  Most of these tales are presented as stories from the author’s life, anecdotes about his messed up life and his attempts to square being a respectable father and neighbor with the deviant malcontent (and husband) within.  The perv is certainly on display in the showroom, though these tales steer far from becoming grotesque and trans-vaginal, and this warped Ward Cleaver is most interesting when he’s not being a little hard on the beaver.

Two of my favorite stories are clever little bits of weird, the first involving the author attempting to meet the great Captain Lou Albano and the second being a musing over the creator of the classic Holocaust comic book memoir Maus and my beloved, forbidden Garbage Pail Kids.  Until here, I didn’t know that the creator of these vastly different cultural artifacts was the same person.

I’m also a fan of Olsen’s hateful reminiscences of his own father figures, as well as his adventure in shitting in a sandbox.

Much of what makes this mishmash of bizarre stories function is that there’s a humor and humanity to them that doesn’t wallow in the sordid details.  I suppose that the fact that each story is but one page long helps this.  I definitely want to read something longer from Josh Olsen, but this quick, fascinating burst of screwball tales is captivating enough on its own.

April 24, 2012
Categories: Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Medium: Literature

Stimulus: Chuch Palahniuk ‒ Damned

In Chuck Palahniuk’s new world, Hell is Hollywood.  Hell is also Hell, full of the typical wailing, gnashing teeth, and rising lakes of wasted jizz that serve as Hell’s equivalent of global warming.  But if we’re stacking up the hierarchy of the awful, consider this ‒ even Palahniuk’s Satan has a script he’s trying to sell.

Damned promotes itself as The Breakfast Club in Hell, and if Madison, its pudgy, oft-neglected hero, resembles any member of that Saturday morning detention crowd, it’s the Ally Sheedy neurotic girl.  (In discussing that 80s film classic, our girl notes that she howls with terror when the popular cheerleader gives said outcast a condescending makeover.)  Madison’s quite a bit more than that dark, mousy type, however.  In true Palahniuk fashion, this preteen is quick to assert that she knows middle of the road words like gender, excrement, tenacious, and feign ‒ yet in casual moments she nonchalantly drops bigger words and phrases like colonoscopies, biological imperatives, vivandiers, and coals-to-Newcastle.  I have no idea what that last phrase even means.

This newly lost soul spent life as an unloved prop to her vapid Hollywood parents, the sort of people who adopt kids from around the world shortly before shipping them off to boarding school, the sort of people who fly their kids via private jet to ecology retreats.  I get the impression that there’s a healthy portion of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in these absurdly cosmopolitan celebrity caricatures.

After dying from a marijuana overdose, Madison meets up with the requisite Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and Judd Nelson characters, and this infernal Breakfast Club goes traipsing around the hoary netherworld in search of misadventure.  As time goes by, Madison gets kind of awesome.  She preaches the joys of damnation in her telemarketing job, beats up Hitler in grand, hilarious style, and goes on a spew-soaked revenge haunting.

The last book of Chuck’s that I picked up before this one was Snuff, whose porno gangbang setting was the most obvious and inevitable thing an author inclined toward burying his readers in freakshows and trivia could have produced.  That book was so over the top as to become really, really boring.  In contrast, Damned is kind of delightful.  Perhaps the choice of setting absorbs some of that stereotypical shock.  Sure, Palahniuk’s paintbrush colors up a pretty disturbing landscape of the inferno, but it’s Hell, so that’s kind of expected.  With the need to shock sort of canceled out, the story ends up relying on wit and characterization, and Palahniuk, perhaps having no choice, ended up writing a book combining the scope and cleverness of Robert Olen Butler’s Hell with the innocent charm of Judy Blume, right down to beginning each chapter with “Are you there, Satan?  It’s me, Madison.”  Damned seems to be a reworking ‒ if not total subversion ‒ of Chuck Palahniuk’s established formula, and as such, it made me a fan again.

March 6, 2012
Categories: Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Medium: Literature

Stimulus: Drew Magary ‒ The Postmortal

In keeping with my recent forays into near future dystopian literature comes The Postmortal, a fascinating account of a 21^st Century in which humanity has eliminated aging.  This story is all about being careful what you wish for; almost from the moment humanity unleashes nigh-immortality it spends the rest of the story trying to cram it back into Pandora’s Box.  Humanity doesn’t become one iota superior for having shaken off the reaper: immortals keep pumping out kids on autopilot, the new mankind-worshipping religion comes off as equally totalitarian as the afterlife salesmen it supplanted, and the internet trolls have painted themselves green and run out into the real world to maim and murder.  In this world of total overpopulation and self-absorption, it takes no great imagination to predict that the forever business would soon change back to the death business.

The story’s lead, a former estate lawyer named John Farrell, eventually falls into the death business, getting his feet wet as a euthanasia assistant (known in oh so customer service terms as End Specialists).  As the world continues to slide due to people’s stubborn refusals to die and/or stop multiplying, Farrell and the rest of the Kevorkians find themselves upgraded to government-sponsored public hitmen, charged with taking out the elderly and undesirable.

But that’s only the latter half of the story ‒ and honestly, it’s the least compelling half.  Mostly, that’s because the most fun in The Postmortal comes in watching Drew Magary describe the minutiae of the brave new world through Farrell’s journals.  Our hero ponders such ideas as the decline and transformation of marriage in a world where “to death do you part” has no meaning, the end of retirement and Social Security, immortality’s effect on crime and punishment, the fading of personal goals to work towards, and the strong possibility that almost nobody is really prepared to face up to the massive personal responsibilities involved in existing forever.

I like John Farrell as a character, though his narrative is way too full circle as old flames tend to neatly pop out of nowhere to replace new voids in his life.  He’s an intelligently written cipher through which the reader gets to look into a fantastically terrifying future.  That’s said, his philosophies and sociology are much more gripping than his life.  As Magary’s big world-building gives way to the desperate living within that world, a bit of that fascination fades and is replaced by horror.

Within the dystopia lit I’ve read recently, I’ve found that I like the big-picture approach, on display in Albert Brooks’ 2030, over the sort of Player One solipsism seen in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.  The Postmortal occupies a strong middle ground between the two, moving from Brooks’ style to Shteyngart’s, from sociology to the surreal.  Beyond my reservations on building a story of immortality around a guy who seems unable to move forward ‒ and maybe that’s the point ‒ this story of the end of the end is really magnificent.

February 7, 2012
Categories: Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Medium: Literature

Stimulus: Albert Brooks – 2030

Anno: 2011

I’ve recently developed a fascination with American declinist literature, stories taking place not far in the future which predict the end of America’s run as king of the mountain.  In reading Albert Brooks’ excellent account of the wane of one more empire, I drew immediate parallels to Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, though as soon as I did so the differences also presented themselves.  The destination of both books is the same, but the focus of each is the polar opposite of the other.  Shteyngart’s story is concerned with the clutching desperation for youth in a hyper-networked world.  It describes, almost by necessity, a more absurd, idiotic place (I hesitate to say that it is more self-obsessed).  In contrast, the world Brooks describes is being wrecked by the old, who have become an undying, retired ruling caste with no regard for the Social Security slave state it has created.  Here, the young are not venerated but marginalized and then feared as hopelessness boils over.

The colors Brooks paints with are much more sober and human.  Leaving out the flying cars and neo-Facebook crackheads, the only technology that’s really fetishized in his story is medical technology.  The cancer cure that turned 60 into the new 30 was just the beginning of the immortality industry that both elevates and plagues this world, but Brooks doesn’t have his characters speak in Internetese or act hip and futuristic.  Both the old and young are gathered together and presented as terrified, self-interested, conflicted, and most of all familiar characters.  This point is precisely what gives 2030 its power.

This wide scope also leads to some weird changes in perspective in which the reader gets into the thoughts of multiple people at the same time.  This pinball narrative isn’t unreadable, but for those conditioned to read and write a certain way, it is noticeable.  Also noticeable is a thin political vagueness that seems to indicate a desire to make the issues of 2030 beyond politics.  This is best seen in the American president, a central character who is buried under his nation’s rubble, as well as his own.  He isn’t explicitly labeled a Democrat, but his team is pretty obvious.  One of his rivals is painted as a corporate opportunist who plays the field, but his business interests in a chain of retirement homes would seem to make him an ardent anti-Kevorkian Republican.  As opposed to the contradictions and asymmetry of the characters, I don’t think this lack of definition in the big picture completely works.

This is a pretty amazing work of future world building which has easily become my favorite story of the end of the United States as we know it.  The characterization amidst the deep examination of an impending and severe social issue makes clear that Albert Brooks wasn’t simply interested in creating an American grave to dance upon.  What’s most gripping about 2030 is the possibility that he might be right about everything.

October 3, 2011
Categories: Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment