You're on an Airplane - Parker Posey (2018)

This, along with our previous celebrity memoir, were picked up when I randomly browsed what was on the shelves of the local branch of the CPL in advance of a week-long trip to Palm Springs. I didn't realize Parker Posey had written a memoir (I would imagine most people also, did not know this) but I always liked her in anything I saw her in, and appreciated the niche she had carved out for herself in film. It also would be a good book to read on a trip such as this.

Actually, it was not, because I felt vaguely self-conscious whenever I opened it on one of the 4 different flights I took, irrationally concerned that a fellow passenger might see the cover and consider it too apropos and ironic, as if I was reading it for a reaction. Usually, when a person next to you remarks on your book, it is a welcome exchange (it is for me, at least, given this blog). I remember a particularly positive one, on a flight to New York in 2017, involving Elena Ferrante, so hip and "advanced" as New Yorkers continually prove themselves to be, that portended a meaningful return.  

People namecheck Elena Ferrante so they can sound "in the know" (Hollywood did come knocking, more than once, most recently with a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal that I liked, but which is apparently very divisive); and certainly, people that namecheck Parker Posey may not be "in the know" to the burgeoning cultural moment, but they are certainly "in the know" about independent film.

Yet some of us only know an actor's oeuvre in broad strokes, as each performance gets spit out immediately after it has coalesced into a vision. When an actor finishes a role, they are done with it--unless sequels are planned, or it is a TV show. 

My dad has gotten into a number of TV shows lately, and I have tried to watch them on his recommendation. We agreed on Fleabag and The Mandalorian. I enjoyed The Queen's Gambit, but not quite to the same degree (ditto for The Marvelous Ms. Maisel). I have not finished WandaVision, but I have liked what I have seen fine. His latest binge has been on Lost in Space and I had been meaning to start it. Shortly after I checked this out from the CPL, I found out that Parker Posey is the star of that show (or at least its biggest star), and now I will be starting it sooner. I will also get around to seeing Blade: Trinity (which I think also requires watching the first two), because I believe that she is good in everything she does. 

***

It is perhaps easiest to begin by forming a list of adjectives to describe the book: "quirky," "manic," "irreverent," "disorganized," "messy," "educational," "surprising," "humorous," "ironic," and "cute." It is pretty light reading, yet I found it somewhat difficult to engage with the material until I had locked in for a few pages and could follow the thread of each narrative episode. So, it was not a quick read. 

I was somewhat put-off by the first 50-100 pages, because it seemed like the book was going to be "padded," with all of the cutesy re-purposed photographs in the margins of its pages. By its end, that decision made a certain amount of sense: nearly every biography, and many memoirs, contains a section of pages near the middle (or perhaps several such sections), that consist exclusively of photographs with captions. Now, these are always welcome respites and feel like "shortcuts" through the book, yet they tend to deepen and enliven the material, particularly when the artists themselves are steeped in the art of photography (I am thinking of Patti Smith and Susan Sontag, here).

Posey need not do that, because her life's work is on film. Reproducing stills from the films would feel self-congratulatory and unnecessary, and while there might be a few candid photos with other celebrities, these are kept private, because Hollywood is a very dirty place, it seems.

***

Before I read this book, I knew Parker Posey to be an actress that did not hog the spotlight, that seemed comfortable being a "character actor." I had recently re-watched Best in Show shortly before I picked this up, and was reminded of her delirious performance in that, which has to be one of her best. I didn't remember her in much else, to be honest, except the film adaptation of the Dennis Cooper novel, Frisk, because she was also the biggest star in it.  She was in Dazed and Confused, but sort of blended into the background with all the other famous actors in their breakout performances. She is in pretty much every Christopher Guest movie since Waiting for Guffman (and always a highlight in each). I am pretty sure I saw Broken English and Fay Grim, but I remember nothing about either. I enjoyed Irrational Man more than I was expecting, but I forgot she was in it. I also forgot she had a character arc on Louie. I don't remember her in Scream 3, but I think I am about to re-watch it, a Scream marathon, for the new one. I'm pretty sure I watched Party Girl (which for some reason, I believe is her "iconic" performance, and the one that gave her the vaguely acknowledged moniker as the "queen of independent cinema"), but I don't remember much about it. I liked Kicking and Screaming, but again, do not remember much about it 

That was Noah Baumbach's debut, which came out in 1995, and only now, in the past couple of years, probably after Greta Gerwig put out Ladybird, is he acknowledged as a marquee director. I could write about other directors referenced here that later "had their moment" (Richard Linklater, though he did that right out of the gates; Greg Mottola; Julian Schnabel; Hal Hartley and Greg Araki, though never major names, but major icons of independent film; Zoe Cassavetes, and it's surprising just how many "acclaimed artists" Netflix has managed to snag). I wanted to make a special note that I loved the movie subUrbia and also did not realize she was in it. I do not remember much at all about Superman Returns except that Kevin Spacey played Lex Luthor and that it failed to generate sequels. There was probably some sketchiness on the set with the director being Bryan Singer, but Posey is not interested in getting any artists "canceled." 

I could write about a lot of things in this review, because this book sort of encompasses everything about Hollywood over the past 30 years, and because Posey feels omnipresent and underappreciated within that, but we should stick to the text.

***

She was born at the tail-end of the 1960's with a fraternal twin brother (the first fact I did not know), and raised in or around Shreveport, Louisiana. And here we have to mention the single best part of this memoir, which is her writing about her father. 

Her father is, frankly, outrageous, and it feels vulnerable to admit this, but I have always been sort of ambivalent about having children (to say nothing of economic barriers) until reading this, because I would love to be the sort of dad that he was to her. In short, more human beings could stand to be like him:

"My dad brings the 'never met a stranger' phrase [she earlier described him as "a comedian without a venue"] to a whole other level. I've met people on sidewalks in New York who say they had a great time with my dad on a flight or in a restaurant somewhere--they go out of their way to tell me this. He's so charismatic and seductive that he once gave an impromptu chiropractic adjustment to someone he'd just met at a business party, in San Diego. No, he's not a professional chiropractor, he was a car salesman. He got that lady to lie on a table so he could crack her neck. When we saw her rubbing her neck, looking like she was in pain as she walked to her husband, we tiptoed, running, out of there. When he'd try to sell a new car to a potential buyer, he'd put a fake poopy diaper in the trunk to 'break the ice'--that kind of shit. He could sell ice to water." (116)

I just spent about 30 minutes trying to find the story about a road trip her family took where they stopped at a random convenience store along with the way and bought masks (one of them was Nixon) and how her parents drove with the masks on to freak out other drivers, and how they drank, less, in the car, but it was driving me nuts, so I just had to paraphrase it from memory. 

There are other stories with her dad, but you can see one problem with the text already: it's a blur. That said, flipping through these pages for 30 minutes leads to other things I want to write about, and reminds me that I did, actually, fly through the last 200 pages of the book (maybe because I was waiting around a hospital for hours last week) and cannot situate excerpts. It's a blur, and sometimes there are throwaway lines, throwaway paragraphs--there could have been finer editing, and it seems Posey had total creative control to write this maniacally--yet on the whole this is life in all of its glorious messiness. It is extremely difficult to remain focused when you have lived a storied life and have simply too many intriguing anecdotes to relate.  

***

There are many threads running throughout this book, but if there is one that sets it apart and make it unique, it is the attention Posey pays to the myriad ways that all of our lives are intertwined. There is some form of cosmic connection, it seems, and when we recognize certain coincidences as being too bizarre for belief, it generally merits mention. 

Like the anecdotes about her father, these would be difficult to locate, but one, at least, should be easy.

And it's not! What a surprise. The story I can't find involves Wiley Wiggins and Jason London, perhaps 15 or 20 years after co-starring in Dazed and Confused, and I really shouldn't spoil it, anyways.

Another story I could find involves Shirley MacLaine and Coneheads and UFOs, but that would basically involve copying the entire chapter "Shirley, the Coneheads, and Me," which yes, is one of the standout chapters. 

Posey is a lapsed Catholic, so I could relate to her form of spirituality, which also seems to involve a fair good bit of yoga. The chapter where she describes the entire series of a Sun Salutation ("Garbage on the Beach") was extremely familiar to me, as it likely is for many. The chapter on pottery, however, I did not like nearly as much. It has a moment or two, but felt too much like "inside baseball," despite writing from a beginner's perspective.

***

The book is useful for the recipes that Posey includes. Here, I will include the very rare photographic supplement to a review, for two simple recipes and one hard one:

"...the edge of the pie. I think this takes about 45 minutes. May God bless America." is the missing end to the sentence.

And this one is easy, too:

And this last one sounds tedious and expensive, but also amazing: 

I am not including the recipe for Cheese Crisps by Lynda Posey, but the anecdote is quite amusing.

***

Posey does not trash anyone in this memoir. It was published in 2018, and so the #metoo movement must have had an impact on its writing. Posey details no meeting with Harvey Weinstein, and while it does not seem he had any impact on her career (in the Paltrow sense), he may have indirectly supported it by Making Independent Films Big, and I would imagine they had to have met, at some point. 

If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all, and in Hollywood, when you do, you don't use their names. She does this at a few points in the memoir, and one could probably do a little research and figure out who she meant, but again, such anecdotes would be difficult to locate. 

The chapter "Louie" is a turning point for the book, and it comes fairly early on (around page 100). Posey knows that people want to know what the real Louis C.K. is like, and this chapter should give a fair impression, though there is only a line or two that suggest any latent understandings. Ditto for the chapter "Master of Storms" on her experience working with Woody Allen on Irrational Man. It seems clear, she has serious respect for Allen (refers to him as the greatest living film director) and would not disown her work on his films. 

She also talks a bit (yes, it should be "writes a bit," but the book is written as a long monologue on an airplane to a seatmate, though the device is not followed religiously) about her dog Gracie and how she got him when she was with her boyfriend Ryan, whose last name is later divulged as Adams. This may have been at the height of his career, or right when it was "taking off," and there are a couple light jabs, but nothing incendiary. 

Basically, for the time this book is published--a book about being a Hollywood actress since the 90's--there is little, if any, reference to #metoo. It was published July 24, 2018, and #metoo became a thing in October 2017. Perhaps nothing bad happened to her, and she felt she couldn't write responsibly on the topic, but I can hardly believe this was the case. We should not expect memoirists to explore all of their deepest, darkest and most painful experiences--and this is certainly not that type of book--and perhaps she felt it was unnecessary and distracting. Whatever the case, it is pointless to conjecture as to her motives or the realities of writing and publishing; just know that when she dishes, it is usually more innocuous than damning. She is not out to get anyone canceled. And perhaps, in a way, because of this, the book does not come off as phony. Some might consider it somewhat superficial (a great deal of space is dedicated to a wrist injury and the perils of home renovation), but there is nothing phony about it. These elements do, unfortunately, make it feel somewhat like a tease, but if a reader is hoping for "dirt," that may say more about them than the author that chooses to make their memoir un-sensational. 

***

I had mixed feelings as I waded through the text, but I never felt Posey to be anything less than charming, perhaps most so when she knew she was being annoying by writing an entire chapter about the mechanics of pottery-making. Upon completion, my feelings are more positive than not. The ending, while somewhat appropriate, is a totally random place to finish, and it's clear Posey was trying to do something different with this book. She is not a comedian, but clearly her father's love for comedy was passed down, and it reads more like a comedian's memoir than an actor's memoir. Her writing is effortless, and several rules are broken, but people say you need to learn all of the rules in order to break them, and this book probably would not exist if Posey had focused her efforts on writing rather than acting. It could have used better editing, but I also understand the choice was made to keep it weird. I appreciate that, and this book made me appreciate Parker Posey more than I already did, deepened the pseudo-crush I always had on her, and made me hope that perhaps one day our lives will also intersect. Arguably, they already did when she lived in Janeane Garafalo's building, and I lived across the street at 5th and 10th in 2001 (a dorm--former abode to Mark Twain and apparently Edith Wharton, which I didn't know until reading this); but no "on point" anecdote exists that merits mention, not yet. 

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning about Life from an Addiction to Film - Patton Oswalt (2015)

This was Patton Oswalt's second book, and I haven't read Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, which was also a memoir. I believe that one is more about stand-up comedy and this one is, obviously, more about cinema. That said, there is a pretty good amount of material on stand-up comedy in it. I would say it is actually about 50/50. 

I don't want to go into an exegesis of Oswalt as a cultural figure, but it is inevitable. He is most famous for giving the voice to Remy in Ratatouille and perhaps his role on "King of Queens." However, he is a very good actor in his own right (Big Fan and Young Adult are both excellent). In 2011, he was given the Vanguard Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. And of course, as a stand-up comedian, he would be considered A-list. 

He did contribute to a third book, which was started by his wife Michelle McNamara before her untimely passing, and I'll Be Gone in the Dark seems like it might be better than Silver Screen Fiend, primarily due to the heaviness of the subject matter and context of its publication. (It was also adapted into a documentary for HBO.) It's not ironic that Patton Oswalt went to see Pulp Fiction with Marc Maron (and a third friend, Blaine Capatch), but it feels like it should be. Sometimes things happen and life is just unfair. Sometimes people become successful and get paid, and they pay for it in other ways. No lessons can be learned from such tragedies. Great art, however, can be made as a sort of salve for anyone in the audience whose lives have similarly been devastated by the cruel and arbitrary nature of the universe.

But back in the good ol' days of 2015, life was better than we appreciated it being, and Oswalt put out this book about self-education in cinema, which was undertaken in the hopes that it would magically transform him into a film director. 

***

Immediately, the concept is appealing to me. I did a similar thing when I was 18, but it was with Blockbuster's $30 for 30 days deal, and I did a new movie every night. When I was about to start NYU, I wanted to be a film director (or a critic, secondarily). I probably watched most of the Woody Allen catalog, perhaps to prepare for the move to NYC. And while my interest in making films soon waned, after appearing in one and experiencing the enormous obligations and extent of collaboration with tech personnel, I wanted to work on my own, because I didn't have the confidence to say, "this story is good enough to film, and good enough to ask you all to give me a huge chunk of your time to work on it with me." As an older person now, I recognize that spirit of collaboration as a beautiful thing, and that if tech personnel are actually being paid for their time, it is less daunting to ask for it. 

But I was young and dumb for many years (that continue to this day...), and I would not abandon wanting to make movies, such that six years after those first forays into cinema, I would move to California to try to insinuate myself into Hollywood. When I went to the movies, it was mostly to the bigger chains to see bigger films (Into the Wild, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, Wall-E, The Dark Knight) but one night, I went by myself to see the new movie about Joy Division, Control, at the NuArt Theatre in Santa Monica.

***

It feels appropriate to mention Peter Bogdanovich, as I just finished listening to his WTF Interview in memoriam. One of his films must be referenced here. It does not feel as appropriate to mention Roman Polanski, who is definitely referenced at least once or twice (Knife in the Water and Repulsion). Bogdanovich was very close with Orson Welles. As I listened, I followed along on his Wikipedia page. I haven't seen The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or pretty much any of his other films (actually I have not seen any of them and now I feel like a fraud for thinking I had a decent education). The best parts of the interview were anecdotes about Welles, who is certainly one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, though ended his career in rather sad fashion (his final performance, five days before his death, was in Transformers: the Movie, one of my early favorites, as the voice of the super-villain Unicron, which is pretty perfect in a way).  

There is no index to Silver Screen Fiend, perhaps because this is not an academic volume, but there is an Appendix which lists all of the films Oswalt saw over the four years of his "addiction," from 1995 to 1999. The period starts with a double feature of Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole at the New Beverly Cinema, which was an institution, until its owner, Sherman Torgan, passed away; Quentin Tarantino (an offspring of Bogdanovich, in a way) has recently restored it and taken over management. It ends with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which is quite fitting.

In those four years, he saw 51 movies at the NuArt; I think I saw 2 in my one year nearby (Smiley Face after Control). But I went to the NuArt on my own, by myself, and it felt sort of special to me because nobody had ever really mentioned it and I had never really thought about it until I saw it written about in here. So that part of the book is personal to me, also. 

***

One could not do much better than starting off an education in cinema with Billy Wilder. I've seen Sunset Boulevard a handful of times, and Ace in the Hole once, fairly recently (it didn't move me nearly as much as Sunset, The Apartment, The Lost Weekend, Witness for the Prosecution, or what I consider his ultimate masterpiece, Double Indemnity--but it was on par with Some Like it Hot; I probably need to see it again, along with many others of his yet unseen). Donald Trump's most redeeming quality was his appreciation for Sunset, as he felt a kinship with Norma Desmond (his results bore more fruit, rotten as it may have been). It is an essential film, and perhaps the greatest on the subject of Hollywood. I don't think I have ever seen a silent film (further fraudulence) but at least I have seen Buster Keaton in that. William Holden and I are birthday buddies, so I felt connected to his element as well. It's beautifully shot, amusing and moving; one could not do better than start their education here. 

Oswalt weaves in and out of anecdotes from the actual moviegoing experiences. One of the best is a story about watching Citizen Kane at the New Beverly with Lawrence Tierney in the audience:

"For about fifteen minutes he sat there, talking to the screen as if he were just out of view to the other characters, admonishing Kane. 'Don't clap for that squawking bitch, she can't sing. Siddown, ya chump!' 'Aw Jesus, what's he staring at? You gonna cry, fancy man?' It was the best DVD commentary I've ever heard." (96)

He weaves in and out, talking about his burgeoning career in stand-up, television and film (I never had any desire to see Down Periscope, but now, I think I will). He primarily does this through his "Night Cafe" motif. 

Briefly, "The Night Cafe" is a painting by Vincent van Gogh, which came out of a moment of inspiration where he sort of locked in and figured out what he was trying to do with his art. The idea of the Night Cafe is a place where you go, and having been there, your life is changed forever. Oswalt goes through six such venues, one of which is the New Beverly Cinema (a few other comedy clubs mostly fill out the six). This is not a bad framing mechanism for the memoir and seems like a truism for anyone in the arts: there will always be certain spaces where a particular person will enter, find inspiration, and start from a new beginning. 

So, a lot of this is about working out a stand-up routine, and making the transition between regional comic on the Mid-Atlantic Coast to featured act on the West Coast. I do not do stand-up comedy (though I have wanted to try, against my better instincts) and so writing about it may expose further fraudulence. And frankly, even though none of this material is bad (probably the most beautiful writing comes out of these sections), I felt it detracted from the exercise that is this book, perhaps in the name of readability or entertainment. I would rather read an arch, academic, scholarly text on cinema by Patton Oswalt than a hybrid stand-up/film memoir. Clearly, with all of the knowledge Oswalt displays at random moments in the text, along with the intellectual pedigree he also exhibits, he is capable of writing that book. But it probably would not sell as well. And perhaps, there is the comedian's impulse, to turn every observation or anecdote or explanation into a punchline, and so a more serious book is improbable (I have not read his section of I'll Be Gone in the Dark, and I would imagine there are not many punchlines, but I would not be surprised if there are a couple). 

He starts his education, after seeing Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole, by going through five of his books on film and reading up on those he has seen: The Film Noir Encyclopedia, Cult Movies (three volumes), and Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. He then decides to see as many of the movies in these books as he can, marking an asterisk next to each, and the dates and places he saw them. That is the "plot." 

***

I'm not sure what else to say, except that the book is very good and anyone who appreciates cinema or stand-up comedy should find something to admire in it. It made me laugh out loud at several points. It will probably refer you to a film or two that you haven't seen. 

For me, this was La Jetee, which I had seen in Paris while studying abroad as part of a course on film, but which I had forgotten about completely. This reminded me that it provides some inspiration for 12 Monkeys: 

"Chris Marker's moody, near-motionless meditation on the costs of time travel and nostalgia--barely half an hour long but leaving you feeling like you'd just been dragged through a lifetime's worth of emotion and loss. This must have been showing with other movies--Sans Soleil? Maybe a Tarkovsky? But all I wrote down was La Jetee." (103)

I remember feeling sort of bored and confused when I saw it the first time, so now I feel like I need to again. It's not a huge investment of time. Just now I have reserved the DVD at CPL, and yes, it is packaged together with Sans Soleil.  

Sure, I would have liked for Silver Screen Fiend to be more Against Interpretation than Bossypants, but I also probably enjoyed the experience of reading the latter more than I enjoyed the experience of pretending like I understood the former. So overall, Oswalt did well with this. With these two under his belt, it is inevitable there must be a third. He is in the very rare category of artist that can do pretty much whatever he wants, now; he is one of those people that is pretty much great in everything he's done, and I don't doubt it would be compelling.  

Writing this review though, I am dismayed. Having written the word "Oswalt" this many times, with Batman on my mind (which is frequently the case), it is enormously sad that he will not be playing The Penguin in The Batman. Jonah Hill would have made a pretty good Penguin, and I am sure that Colin Farrell will do a totally decent Penguin, but a Patton Oswalt Penguin (where Robert Pattinson is Batman)....perhaps that would be too close to a Jim Carrey Riddler (a movie that does show up in the text)....but it would be brilliant casting, nonetheless. It's too bad there are no time machines. Yet.  

As Summer's Mask Slips and other Disruptions - Gordon B. White (2020)

Full disclosure: I have known Gordon White for about 18 years. We met in our dorm and shared many friends and acquaintances. Towards the end of our time, I heard he was pretty serious about his writing, but I had no occasion to peruse his work. Then, about six years ago, I think, he invited me to be part of his friend's writing workshop, which was conducted online via Google Hangouts. I wrote a long 2-part story about my experiences in city government that I will probably never unearth again. I was trying to find old edits from that workshop on files saved from old computers, but I cannot at the moment. However, I am relatively sure that I saw early versions of two, or maybe three stories in this volume. Those are: the story that opens the collection, "Hair Shirt Drag;" the title story; and "Birds of Passage." (Note that I am only positive on the middle one.) 

A note on genre: if anything, this review should be an exploration of the divide between so-called "speculative fiction" and so-called "literary fiction." Because I almost never read "speculative fiction." When I entered the writing workshop, I thought I might try my hand at one story in that genre, but I couldn't. Certainly, there are many inexplicable things that happen in the world that inspire awe and possibility; however, as I've gotten older and more cynical, I am less apt to believe in things such as aliens, to say nothing of witches, vampires and ghosts*. There are no aliens here; this is not science fiction. These are horror stories, but some of them are not supposed to be scary at all, but rather, wide-eyed at the mysteries of the unseen world. 

This is put to greatest effect in the story that closes the collection, which I have to believe most people think is the best, "Birds of Passage." The story is a memory of an overnight camping trip a 10-year-old boy takes with his father, canoeing through a stream of shifting features, ending up in a sort of otherworldly place that is completely silent and subsumed totally by nature, without a shred of humanity in view. Something happens over the course of the night that changes the way both feel about the world (though it seems as though the father is not very surprised, and has experienced something similar in his past, camping in the same spot with an old friend). The story is written as a remembrance, after the father has recently passed away, and it is hard to see this as anything but an elegy. It's extremely powerful. The problem I have with "speculative fiction" is the unbelievability factor, but this piece has to be autobiographical, to one degree or another.  It's written with such a convincing sense of reality, portraying the way strange alien things can only be glimpsed for a moment, obscured by a veiling effect to dissemble the truth that there is more to the world than it seems. It is also a heartwarming story of bonding with one's father. I believe it won an award or two, and it is, if anything, the real beginning of his career as a serious writer of fiction.

Or a serious writer of speculative fiction? There is a great deal of snobbery around genre fiction, and I am well aware because I am one of those snobs. Romance novels? Please. Science-fiction? I've enjoyed it in the past, it's probably my favorite "genre," but I don't ever reach for new ones (certainly I loved H.G. Wells and Kurt Vonnegut when I was younger; but never really read Isaac Asimov or Douglas Adams, or Octavia Butler, for that matter). Mystery novels, whodunits or true crime? Just this, from another friend. Horror? Maybe when I was younger. My mom used to say that the book of The Exorcist was quite good, and that the scariest book she ever read was Ghost Story by Peter Straub. Yes, I read a fair amount of Stephen King growing up, too. But also, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which probably had the biggest effect on me, and which feels closer to some of the stories in this collection (albeit less "adult," though these stories are not especially lurid or exploitative, despite often gruesome subject matter). 

A few of the other stories worked for me. After "Birds of Passage," "The Buchanan Boys Ride Again" is probably my favorite, because it feels like a true "blockbuster" that could easily be made into a movie, or at the very least a short film in some one-off Black Mirror-like anthology series. It concerns a son and a father fighting off monsters coming out of plumbing fixtures in an old, cheap motel. It sounds ridiculous, but the pacing and descriptive language of the action made it both very frightening and compelling.  

***

Two of the stories feel more ambitious: "Mise en Abyme" and "Eight Affirmations for the Revolting Body Confiscated from the Prisoners of Bunk 17." The former is more interesting than the latter. The latter reminded me of The Power, except the sequel to it where the woman-ruled world is invaded and overtaken by aliens that seemingly resemble humans and have a taste for flesh. "Mise en Abyme" is a deeper sketch of a dystopian society wherein several citizens are executed live on television each night, and the editor assigned the task of "censoring" the videos, which involves putting a black box over their eyes, deals with a rogue agent that is broadcasting the videos uncensored. She is also involved with (married to?) the Overseer, who seems to be the dictator of the society. 

Ultimately, she is summoned into a world of infinite reflection, with a small dot of light at the very far end; she has some kind of special purpose, and I will not spoil the plot, but I did not really understand it, either. 

There is also a smattering of flash fiction here, with several stories weighing in at 2-3 pages. I have zero issues with flash fiction except that it more closely approximates poetry than fiction. One of those very short stories ("The Hollow," which opens up with a lawyer being summoned for testamentary purposes by two sisters who may be drug addicts and/or close to dying and have to do something with the family home, I think) shows a lot of promise, before quickly devolving into the grotesque. These sorts of things tend to happen frequently in this collection, there is some form of terrible transformation.

"Open Fight Night at the Dirtbag Casino" is the last story to highlight, because it also seems to be set up as part of a longer piece. This is a type of "Groundhog Day" story, except it's not the same day, just the same place and the same opponent in a fight to the death, with the main character fighting as different bodies they have overtaken each night. It's a satisfying story on its own, but I think it encapsulates the way I feel about most of the others: these characters are blank slates. They seem to represent "everymen" or "everywomen" and do not seem to have idiosyncratic personal backgrounds/experiences--the lived-in feel, that is present in the best of them. I skimmed around some of the stories when I felt I sensed the general vibe of what was happening, or perhaps because I wasn't being grabbed by the neck. 

It is a lot to ask of an author for their first publication to be a masterpiece, particularly when working in this genre, without major funding from an institutional patron. This is a passion project, and for the most part, it is a successful one. There is great promise in it, and talents such as Gordon's (and his "fraternal writing twin" Rebecca Allred, who was also part of that online workshop) seemed destined to blossom into genius, particularly when they are capable of beautiful passages such as this:

"'I feel it,' I said, although the description of it wouldn't come to me for years. But the way I said it, my dad knew. He nodded.
'I don't know what you'd call it,' he finally said. With a slender stick, he prodded the embers on our low fire and sent the shadows skipping like water bugs. 'Maybe the bigness of nature, or a great spirituality. Something, though, you don't feel at home.'
He looked out for a moment at the darkness, at the stars above. 'Sometimes,' he said, 'I think about all the possible worlds we could have lived in, but that we're in the one that makes you my son and me your father and brings us here. It sounds stupid'--he paused--'but sometimes I look at you and I think, 'Are you real?'
'Yeah,' I said. He laughed and I smiled, even though I don't know if he saw me do it, there in the shadow just beyond the fire's light. For a while, we just sat and listened to the world.
'Do you feel it everywhere?' I eventually asked, meaning the thing he had talked about and meaning everywhere outdoors; but even though I didn't clarify, my father knew. He and I shared a wavelength like that.
'Maybe if you try real hard, but I've never felt it quite like I feel it here.' He leaned back, caught between the orange light below and the silver light above. 'Just think,' he went on, 'that outside of our fire light, it's miles to the nearest town. Straight up and out above us, for millions of miles, is nothing but empty space. Beneath our skin, hidden deeper from sight, run rivers of blood and cells and atoms and, deeper still, the empty spaces between them. You and I and everything else are just thin layers between space and distances, just skins between mysteries we could never know.'
He stopped, probably wondering if he'd gone too far or said too much. Then he looked at me and asked, 'Are you scared?'
'No,' I said, 'but it is a little scary.'
'Yeah,' he nodded as he spoke, 'but it's also kind of awesome.'" (160-161)

This is also sort of the way I feel about this collection: a little scary, and kind of awesome. At the very least, it is a portent of greater things to come. And I do believe Gordon has just published his second book, which I hope to check out soon.

*It is possible that aliens exist, and sometimes I think I might believe in ghosts, but I find it hard to believe that witches or vampires are real--though obviously witches could be.