Homesick for Another World - Ottessa Moshfegh (2017)

Ottessa Moshfegh came to my attention through The Paris Review Podcast (Episode #7), in which she read her story, "A Dark and Winding Road." I hadn't heard of her before. Because Dead Boys and Try made the Best Books list (both many years ago), so too must this.  She is a contemporary, just a couple years older than me. I am jealous of her. She is a great writer. She is not boring. Her concerns are not trivial. Yet they sometimes are? It's o.k. She's hilarious.  She is hardcore.

Story collections often make for difficult reviews because there can be so much ground to cover, but like Dead Boys, the stories here seem to have enough elements in common for an overarching theme to emerge. At first blush (or second), one could write off this work as going for "shock value." And indeed, few of these characters are completely uncontroversial. The teacher in the first story pounds 40's and sleeps in a sleeping bag in her classroom after hours. More than one male character uses make-up to try to hide their acne. Crystal meth is consumed by several characters. Two older male characters half-stalk women they vaguely know and pine for. Few of them seem to have "enough" money, and none of them have lives that anyone would aspire towards. Almost every single one is flawed, and deeply so. Great literature often portrays characters that are internally flawed--they appear normal outwardly but something happens that causes them to become unhinged. Here, everyone is basically already unhinged. And we can debate back and forth all night about the merits of writing about flawed characters, but the sad fact is, from what I have seen, people just keep getting stranger and stranger. So this is a great book for our times, one of the best books I have read in the last couple years. 

To run through the stories: "Bettering Myself" is a story about a teacher in New York City, perhaps in a bygone-era, pre-2004 (smoking allowed in bars), who resigns for personal reasons.  "Mr. Wu" is about a man who has a crush on a woman who runs an internet "arcade" and who engineers a scheme to secretly text her and meet up with her.  Once I gave my sister a book of Raymond Carver short stories and put an asterisk next to all the ones I thought were most worth reading, if she didn't have the time or interest to read them all.  This story would get an asterisk.

Before we run through each of the stories, it is prudent that we include an excerpt, because the book is due back at the library today.  So even though it is probably the most widely publicized story in the book, one passage from "A Dark and Winding Road" particularly hit home for me:

"I rolled a joint in my car with the lights on and smoked it sitting in the armchair, in the dark.  There was no cell phone service up there, which made me nervous.  I don't know why I continued to smoke marijuana as long as I did.  It almost always sent me in an existential panic.  When I smoked with my wife, I had to feign complete exhaustion just to excuse myself from going out for a walk, which she liked to do.  I was so paranoid, so deeply anxious.  When I got high, I felt as though a dark curtain had been pulled across the world and I was left there alone to waver in its cold, dark shadows.  I never dared to smoke by myself at home, lest I throw myself from our twelfth-story window.  But when I smoked that night at the cabin, I felt fine.  I whistled some songs, tapped my feet.  I whistled one difficult tune in particular, a Stevie Wonder song, which is melodically complicated, and after a few rounds I could really whistle it beautifully.  I remembered what it was like to practice and get good at something.  I thought of how great a dad I would be.  'Practice makes perfect,' I'd tell my child, a truism maybe, but it now seemed suddenly endowed with great depth and wisdom.  And so I felt wonderful about myself, forgetting the strange world outside.  I even thought that after my child was born, I'd still come up to the cabin once or twice a month, just to keep the secret of how great I was.  I whistled some more." (76-77)

And later:

"The cabin hardly looked any cleaner after all that sweeping.  In fact, I probably stirred up more dust than I swept out the door.  I sneezed and drank a few beers and relieved myself again and used more hand-sanitizing gel and sat in the armchair.  I smoked another joint.  That last one was a mistake, because after just a few minutes I was picturing my unborn son crying over my grave fifty years into the future, and I felt the gravity of his woe and resentment toward me, and I despised him.  Then I imagined everything bad he'd say about me to his own children after my death.  I imagined my grandchildren's bitchy faces.  I hated them for not worshipping me.  Had they no idea of my sacrifice?  There I was, perfectly wonderful, and nobody would see that.  I looked up and saw a bat hanging from the rafters.  I went to a very dark place.  The oceanic emptiness in my gut churned.  I pictured my old body rotting in my coffin.  I pictured my skin wrinkling and turning black and falling off my bones.  I pictured my rotting genitals.  I pictured my pubic hair filling with larvae.  And after all that, there was infinite darkness.  There was nothing.
Just as I considered hanging myself with my belt, there was a knock on the door of the cabin, and a girl's voice called out, 'MJ?'" (79-80)

It's these types of interior confessions, as inimical as they often are, which set this book apart from others.  I'm not sure if Moshfegh always writes likes this.  She does actually show some pretty incredible range here, writing tonally different stories that are told from diverse perspectives.  She does have her bete-noires, and that is why I compare this to Dead Boys.  Her bete-noir is L.A. and the illusions and dreams that go with it.  She could also be lumped in, easily, with Bret Easton Ellis.

It is perhaps worth noting that half (7 out of 14) of these stories were originally published in The Paris Review.  Several others were published in The New Yorker, Vice, and Granta.  Only the last story ("A Better Place") is printed here for the first time.  This speaks to the quality of the work.  They're all fairly polished pieces in spite of (perhaps because of) their raw subject matter.  That is, they feel untouched by any editorial hands other than the author's.  Truthfully, the book is gone and I can't recall the specific subject matter of each of the stories but I will give it a try, and asterisk those stories I remember being best.

"The Weirdos"* is a first-person (nearly all that I recall are first-person) narrative about a young woman in L.A. living with her wannabe actor/pseudo-landlord/psychopathic boyfriend and the travails of their failing relationship.

Is it possible the male character from "Malibu" and "The Weirdos" is the same?  I doubt it, but it's totally possible.  I always say this (and it's probably not always true) but an adaptation of this collection could make for a great film in the vein of Short Cuts.  Of course the danger is that it would come off more like The Informers.  It would probably end up somewhere in between the two.

"A Dark and Winding Road"* is about a successful Manhattan real estate attorney that goes up to his family's cabin and ends up smoking meth with his brother's girlfriend.  The narrator may rank as the most personally despicable in the collection, though the story is also hilarious.

"No Place for Good People" may have the most endearing and likable narrator in the collection, who is an early 50's man working part-time at a home for the mentally disabled, yet he is also far from perfect.  It is mostly about how he takes three of his residents out to a birthday dinner at Hooter's.

"An Honest Woman" is reminiscent of the oeuvre of Flannery O'Connor (I have gotten halfway through the complete collection of her short stories, and found it an impossible task to adequately review) about a man in his early 60's with vitiligo and how he befriends his new neighbor and tries to set her up with his nephew, drinking with her and failing to hide his obsession with her.

"Slumming"* is about just that--a youngish teacher slumming it up at her summer home in a lower class town.  Again, could this be the same narrator from "Bettering Myself?" It's possible.  "The Beach Boy"* is about a middle-aged couple that goes on vacation in the Caribbean and comes back home to New York to tell their friends about it--then the story takes a ridiculous turn that probably shouldn't work, but ends up doing so beautifully. 

"The Locked Room" is probably the shortest story in the book and is about a girl getting locked in a practice room above a music hall with her boyfriend.  It is probably the most lighthearted and casually amusing entry in the collection.

"Nothing Ever Happens Here" features another aspiring actor in L.A., though this character seems more innocent and sane than those of "Malibu" or "Weirdos."  As usual the story takes a depressing turn.  "The Surrogate" is about a young woman that acts as "surrogate vice president" of a company in order to be seen as a sex object and gain a business advantage.

"Dancing in the Moonlight"* could be the best story in the collection.  It feels more epic and like an actual "story" than the others, as it details a 33-year-old man's Christmas day spent alone, conspiring to travel from New York City to Providence to buy an ottoman so that he can ask the woman he pines for to restore it for him.  Along the way he gets drunk with an older polish lady at a nearby bar.

Finally there is the tonally-different "A Better Place" which is almost fairy-tale like in its simplicity and feels very deep, bringing forth ruminations on a different plane of existence.  It is about a young girl and her twin brother, and how the girl speaks of her wish to return to the better place she was before, and how her brother tells her that the only way to get there is to die or to kill a certain man that their mother has warned her against.  It is hard to tell what this story is about, and it is not one of the best in the collection, yet it would undoubtedly yield profound interpretations if taught as part of a course on fiction writing.

In summation, and upon greater reflection, not everyone will agree that this deserves to be in the Best Books category. Sometimes, the stories come off as primarily comic, and secondarily serious, with little overlap or subtlety of meaning. Perhaps it is just because I give special kudos to authors of transgressive fiction for taking risks with their work, but this book did it for me in a way that few others have lately. I don't have much else to say because I haven't had the book in front of me, and I recognize that this is not up to the standard quality of a NY Times Book Review. I know I could do better, and use the first person a bit less. Moshfegh could do better than this story collection, too. That sounds like a weird thing to say but it's meant to be a compliment. Perhaps she'll fade into the ether, but regardless, she's left behind something beautiful, specifically because it's not.

The Marbled Swarm - Dennis Cooper (2011)

It's not often that I read other reviews of a book before I attempt to write my own.  I used to think that was "cheating" when I wrote film reviews for Washington Square News Weekend at NYU.  It was "cheating" because it was almost like I was afraid to say how I felt about something--or more specifically, afraid that I would praise a film that would be dismissed as a cinematic disaster, or pan a film that would show up on every critic's year-end top 10 list.

We are reaching an important point on Flying Houses.  Recently I applied for a Press Pass for the Pitchfork Festival.  If I get one, it will be the most audacious experience in our history, as I will try to bring in a cameraman and film interviews with the likes of St. Vincent and Beck.  But I won't find out until June and dreams tend not to come true.  Moreover, April 1st will mark our sixth birthday here, and I will post as I have the past couple of years an "MD&A."  After more than 270 posts, one would think I would have the courage to state how I felt about a book without consulting other reviews.  But The Marbled Swarm is one of the more troubling books I have read.  I both liked it, and didn't like it.  It's probably easiest for me to list all of the other books by Dennis Cooper that I have reviewed here and state that I liked it less than all of them.

That's my knee-jerk reaction before even checking all of the others.  But between Closer, Ugly Man,  and Try, I certainly rank it below Closer and Try, and probably beneath Ugly Man too, though maybe I would say it's on par with that.  More importantly from the Ugly Man review, I list and rank all of his books that I've read (six others, three or four of which I would re-read), and from this list I would not put it any higher than #7.

It will be fun to try to explain what this book is about.  First, to continue with the comparison theme, I will say it is most similar to Period in that it is extremely experimental.  I would also say it is better than Period, but maybe I wouldn't stand by that statement if I re-read that book.  But the plot:

The narrator (who is nameless, I am pretty sure) is rich--apparently he is a 22-year-old billionaire (though it doesn't really seem like he is that rich) whose parents were famous French actors.  Well, at least his father, Pierre Clementi, was (I'd need to re-read to check on his mother).  He wants to buy a chateau.  He meets the owners--the father, the mother, and their 14-year-old son Serge--and decides he wants to buy it.  They had another son--16-year-old Claude--who died (Maybe, I think?  For some reason I'm not concerned about spoilers in this review).  Basically, Serge is "interested" in the narrator, and the father seems to think he is a nuisance so he says he will "include him" in the price of the house.  The narrator puts Serge in the trunk of his car and is driven back to Paris (he has a driver, Azmir, of course).  Serge is then raped, murdered, and eaten (Maybe?).  The narrator then starts reminiscing about his younger brother, Alfonse, who was very into Manga and was also eventually raped, murdered, and eaten.  By the narrator and a couple cohorts.  One of those cohorts has a son named Didier who is eventually groomed to look exactly like Alfonse.  Finally, there is the issue of the narrator's father, who apparently dies at some point after Alfonse (though this is confusing, too), and has another property in his will that nobody really knows about in a remote part of France.  There is another story about this house and the people that stayed in it/the reasons why his father built it, that seems to coalesce with the chateau from the beginning of the novel as well as the lofts in which the narrator, Alfonse, and their father reside at in Paris.  Then, the novel ends, and the ending I have to admit is one of the more beautiful endings that Cooper has written.

Why is the ending beautiful?  Because, as may be clear from my plot summary, this book is fucking bonkers and basically impossible to "get."  The most obvious "themes" are younger/older brothers (and this is not the first time Cooper has touched incest--see My Loose Thread), rape/murder/cannibalism (the first two are in nearly every single one of his novels; the last is something new, but seems more "out there" for some reason, and just there to shock), and most conspicuously, secret passageways.  But the ending ties things together as best as it possibly could.

This book is not totally inscrutable.  Cooper does pull back the curtain a couple of times and acknowledges that  he knows that he is not presenting anything close to a linear narrative.  Even so, it is very hard to tell what happened, and I'm not really sure what the whole point of it is:

"The play was set in a chateau whose history of on-site murders, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena required a lengthy spoken foreword, which Claude's father had recited through the speakers for what would have felt like months were not the bloodthirsty details of this story so custom-made for mordant teenagers.
To cite the most agentive of these details, the couple's older son had either killed himself, been murdered, died by tragic accident, or faked his death within the previous few months.
The anguished man and wife had put the crime scene on the market, and the young Parisian, struck by certain parallels between their son's obituary in Le Monde and the clueless death of his own brother years before, found himself inspired to visit the chateau and then acquire it." (171)

I think I've made most of the points I wanted to make about this book, but it is worth noting that in my search for reviews, I came across an interview that Cooper did for The Paris Review in 2011.  You may find it here.  I highly recommend it, as I do most interviews in The Paris Review, which is probably the most important literary journal apart from The New Yorker (though I find The New Yorker to be pretentious most of the time, and really consider an interview in The Paris Review one of the highest honors a writer can receive).  In it, Cooper had this to say about this novel:

"With The Marbled Swarm, I was trying to write a novel the way a sound technician mixes a song or piece of music into its final form. I’ve been studying recorded music and trying to transpose its principles into my fiction ­going all the way back to my first novel,Closer, where one thing I did was try to simulate the sonic effect of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy album with my prose. In The Marbled Swarm I found a voice that let me do that. I thought about each element of the novel, whether it was a narrative thread or character or reference point or an ongoing motif or tone or rhythm. The idea was that they would all always be there, but they would be emphasized or de-emphasized at different points, mixed into the foreground, middle ground, or background, being moved around constantly so the reader’s attention would be directed all over the place. My idea was that it would give the writing a three-dimensional quality, as the reader is carried along by the musical surface of the novel, but he or she would also be chasing different story lines and recurring ideas as they waver and scamper about and hide inside the prose."

This novel certainly creates that sort of feeling.  Cooper also says in the interview that he wants to write one more novel, and then be done with them, so that he can finish with an even ten.  That makes me sad, but he has been pretty prolific over the past 25 years, and the world of literature is richer for the contributions he has made.  I'm sure some people would take issue with that statement, but one of the factors that makes his work more interesting than 90% of his contemporaries is its divisiveness.  While this is not my favorite book by him by a good stretch, it was still a worthwhile read, and the ending was very nice:

"I've failed the marbled swarm as I semi-understand its rules and premise, and, although you'll never know the difference, barring errors that weren't meant as an insidious direction, there is nowhere deeper or more intricately stifled by my story than this hotel room, and I'm out of means to keep you waiting for the secret that involved my sleight of hand unless you think a very frightened thirteen-year-old boy who looks vaguely like Pierre Clementi seems magical or promising enough." (194)

I also loved the references to Isabelle Adjani.

Palo Alto - James Franco

I sat on his couch and he went over to his writing desk.  He opened a drawer and pulled out a few pieces of paper. 

                “This is the first story I want to publish,” he said to me, “Think it will be easy?”

                “Because you’re already famous?”

                “Read it.  Give me your honest opinion.”

                I read it, and I liked it.  It reminded me of a few stories I had read by Richard Lange.  The protagonist was suicidal, so that was one point in its favor.  There were hints of aberrant sexuality, so that was two points.  There was a fair amount of drug use in it, so three points.  I finished it, and looked over at him, who was hunched over his coffee table, breaking up weed to put into a bong. 

                “What’s your diagnosis?”

                “I think you’ll be able to publish it.  Everyone is going to think you’re a doofus, but if they read the story it will shut them up.  I think you have the potential to be one of the most singular artists of our generation.”

                “I’m not trying to monopolize all of the entertainment mediums; I just want to improve my writing skills.  I also want more people to read literary fiction.  I think my fans already are readers—but if I can get just a few more people reading—maybe my books could snowball into others—and I could help to end this massive ignorance threatening to destroy our world.”   

                “I just want to write because it’s fun,” I said.  “I don’t expect to change the world.”

                “Bono wants to change the world,” he said.

                “Are you like Bono?”

                “I’m not bigger than Bono, but I do aspire to raise my cultural cache to his level.”

                “And that involves ending hunger, war, poverty, environmental destruction?”

                “If you have the ability to make good things like that happen, why wouldn’t you?”

                “He doesn’t have the ability,” I said, “And neither will you, and neither will I.  Obama doesn’t even have it.  Nobody can save the world now.  Apple owns the world.  Digital cable companies own the world.  Maybe Verizon owns part of the world.  The only way the world could be saved would be the disappearance of these products.”

                “I think you’re going a little overboard,” he said as he handed me the bong.  I hit it.  He did the same and then he asked me:

                “What was your favorite part of the story?”

                Random question.

                “When the guy says, ‘don’t you ever get jealous of those girls in pornos in the middle of all those dicks?’  So hilarious.” 

                He laughed, and after a beat promulgated, “That was kind of when I realized how much more freedom there is in literature.  I mean, this could be adapted into a short film, it could, but most movies don’t have dialogue like that.  I don’t like how movies make everything seem cooler and easier—I want to represent reality in its fullness.”

                “You know, I have the exact same goal.”

                “Can we stop talking about work for a second?  It’s making me nervous.” 

-"Storyteller," Part II, Chapter 5 

This is an excerpt from my third novel, which I could not complete before starting law school.  I am looking forward to returning to it in about 9 months but I am afraid it will no longer be so topical.  I felt it was useful to include this in my review of Palo Alto because it pretty much sums up the way I felt about it--that is, the way I thought I would feel about it back in April of 2010, and it was published in October 2010.

The story referenced above is "Jack-O,'" which is the final story in the collection.  This was published in Esquire in March of 2010 and it was titled "Just Before the Black" back then.  It may serve as a barometer of the general quality of all of the stories in Palo Alto: it is "pretty good."  

I stop short of calling it "excellent" for several reasons.  My primary complaint with the collection is that the narrator in (almost) every single story is affirmatively dumb.  Or, if not dumb, at least stupid or irrational in some really obvious way.  Now this is to be expected, as Franco's subject matter is, generally, adolescence. Perhaps the narrator in "Lockheed," a girl who does not like math but who is very good at math because her father tells her to be, is the most intelligent.  She works at Lockheed Martin for a summer internship and her job sounds exactly like the type of thing that high school interns would do:

"My job was to watch old film reels of the moon.  There were hundreds.  I worked in a cold, windowless basement.  The reels would run from one spool to another on this old machine that looked like a tank.  I was supposed to record blemishes and splices in the film.  Sometimes the moon was full; sometimes it would get a little more full as I watched.  Sometimes the film was scratched so badly it skipped, or it broke.  I was in the basement forty hours a week.  I watched so many moons."  (15)

She starts to get bored and starts drawing while she does her moon studies at Lockheed.  She works for a man named Jan, and he notices that she has been making some drawings, but does not seem to care.  Later, he offers her an anecdote that is probably one of the better pieces of "advice" in the book:

"'I did these when I was at school,' he said.  'I wanted to be artist.  But it was no good.  It is no good to be artist.  I practiced every day, eight hours a day.  Then I could draw like Michelangelo.  Then what?  There is already Michelangelo.  I realized there was nothing more to do.  In science, there is always more to learn.  Always more.'

I didn't look at him; I looked at his pictures.  I felt very lonely.  I pictured him and his wife, alone at a long table, eating some bland Swedish food, not talking.  The only sounds were from the utensils hitting the plates, and the squish of their gentle chewing.

'So, he said, 'You see.'  He reached over and shut the portfolio to punctuate the 'You see,' but I didn't know what to see.  Then I looked at him.  He stood there and looked at me.  We were so awkward."  (16-17)

Later she witnesses some kind of fight at a party at a kid's house in Menlo Park.  The fight is the "climax" of the story, and is fairly well-done.  "Lockheed" is thus one of the better stories in the collection.

But if forced to pick the absolute best, I would have to say that "April" a 3-part story that is 33 pages long, is the best in the collection.  "I Could Kill Someone," while suffering from perhaps the worst title in the book, comes next in terms of quality (I know it can be hard to give good titles to things and so I am forgiving when it comes to that aspect of creative writing).  Finally, "Chinatown," another 3-part story, though only 16 pages long, fills out the top three in the collection (a mon avis, bien sur).

If you add up the content of those stories (and include "Lockheed") then it is about 85 pages and the book is 195 pages long.  So that is another reason I say the book is "pretty good" (if 170 pages were of this quality it would be "excellent").  But it is very important to point out that I read this entire book in one day.  And it is also striking that I took it out from the Brooklyn Public Library (the day I got my card) along with The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis, another book I similarly read quickly on an airplane trip (that one from NYC to Paris; this one from NYC to Denver).  

There is a very strong connection between these two books, and it is almost as if Franco's characters are the same as in The Rules of Attraction--just a few years younger, a little bit dumber, and generally from poorer families (Palo Alto does not equal Beverly Hills, or the other rich suburban L.A. upbringings of Easton's characters).  

In fact, one of the "praise" quotes on the back spells this out further--Ben Marcus wrote, "Think Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker.  Or better yet, just think James Franco."

I will admit that I once purchased Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke (at the Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago at a discount) and would like to use a line that my younger brother suggested, but I cannot.  Without having read that book, though I would say Ethan Hawke is, myyyyyyyyyyyyyyy second favorite fiction writer-cum-actor.

A couple quotes before ending this review seem fitting, or else people may still continue to write off this "second career" as an exercise in pure dilettantism.  It is important to note at this time, when the debate on "school violence" is peaking, that Franco seems to hit at the very core of the problem in more than one story.  While I have previously suggested that the Internet is to blame for every ill that has felled our society over the past dozen or so years, Franco's story takes place in the pre-Internet era.  And while I certainly appreciate the references to Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, "gangster rap," Menace 2 Society and Boys in the Hood, and other influential artifacts of the 80s-90s, Franco shows that my explanation is far too simple-minded to be taken seriously:

"This is Brent's joke: 'What's the difference between a faggot and shit?' I didn't know the answer.  'Nothing, you fucking faggot.'  He told that joke one time, and then kicked my foot to trip me into dog shit on the quad lawn.  I didn't fall, but everyone thought it was funny.  

Brent says I'm a faggot because I quit the football team freshman year.  I asked him about it and that's when we had our first little scene.  

'You think I'm a fag because I quit the team?' I said.

He stopped.  He had his usual black San Diego Chargers hat on backward.  His long face looked suprised, and the one stoned-looking eye opened a little bit more.

'You are a fucking fag,' he said.  He looked like he was getting a little emotional about it.  I could see it in his retarded eyes.

'Why do you think that?' I said, and my voice trembled.

'I don't think it, you are!'  Then he walked off.  It's weird, but I think it's because he was going to cry.  After that he always called me a faggot."

"After the locker room I decided that Brent needed to die.  He was never going to get smarter, and he was a bigot.  And I couldn't stop thinking about his acne-corroded flesh being opened, and his thin racist blood matting the hair of his beastly body.

I was standing over near the underpass next to the school where people smoked.  Some people called it the Bat Cave.  

'You really want one?' said Barry.  Barry was my friend.  He was chubby and lovable, and Mormon, and smoked pot and loved John Bonham.

'Yes,' I said.  'I want one.'

I wanted a gun.

Barry couldn't get me one, but he knew a guy who could." (170-171)

The story does not have a happy ending or a sad one, and fails to provide any easy answers.  But it is clear that the stupidity of teenagers--going both ways in terms of typical bigotry and the other in terms of intellectual snobbery--is a serious problem that is not easily solved, though the increased awareness of the devastating effects of bullying and the passage of criminal laws on the matter have been steps in the right direction.  

There is still, however, the problem of simply "giving up" and taking others down with you:

"'What do you think about that suicide?' I said.

'I think the parents made him do it,' said Teddy.

'He was Asian,' said Ivan.  He was on the other side of Teddy and I couldn't see him.

'What does that mean?' I said.

'That they worked his ass like crazy and pressured the shit out of him.'

'Do you think it hurt?' I said.

'For a second,' said Teddy.  'But if it's all going to be over anyway, then why does it matter?  Pain only matters if it's prolonged.'  Ivan was sucking long on the joint, then he said, 'If I was going to kill myself, I wouldn't waste it.  I would do a bunch of crazy shit first.  Maybe kill some people I didn't like and take 'em with me.' 

We all thought about that.  Then I said, 'Wouldn't it be better to do a bunch of crazy good things before you died instead of killing people?'

'Like what?' said Teddy.

'I don't know.  Give your life to save a bunch of kids or something.'

'But that's what you're supposed to do every day, not if you're suicidal,' he said.  'If you're suicidal you're probably only thinking of yourself.'

I drank the syrupy alcohol.  

'I try to be good,' I said.

'Me too,' said Teddy.

'Fuck good people,' said Ivan, and we laughed.  

We finished the joint and I gave them both cigarettes.  The stars were dots between the branches.  On the other side of Teddy, Ivan started carving in the tree with a knife.  He carved SUICIDE RULZ.  Teddy was next and wrote FUCK GUNN.  They told me I had to write something.  

'I feel bad, the tree is so old.'

'Fuck you, said Ivan. 'Do it.'

I drew a heart.  It was hard to make it round because of the bark, so it was jagged on one side." (137-138)

In summary, I have to say that this book is "pretty good"--but maybe even a little better than that.  Though it was not "excellent" and I am not going to run around telling everybody that Franco is the greatest living American artist in his prime, I do have to say that he is certainly one of the most interesting.  And I am very happy that our works seems to coalesce.  The quotation above from my incomplete third novel, and the tangent that the novel goes on, were not made without considered judgment.  Palo Alto is a collection of "linked" short stories that could be a novel if it wanted to be--not unlike my first novel.  It has taught me that my first novel is not a total failure, but could be much more "digestible" if converted into something of a similar product.  My second novel basically deals with the same themes as Palo Alto and attempts to portray the same "period" of psychological development.  Moreover this book is a paean to the community in which he was raised, as is S/M.  And the third novel posits the life I might have led if I had gotten into the MFA program at Columbia and entered in the Fall of 2007, when it was certainly possible that Franco could have been my classmate (or friend).  

I hope that he continues to write because it is important for people to realize that subjective human experiences are not always best told through the objective lens of a camera.  It is also clear that Franco has a  very good sense of humor about himself, which is important in an undertaking such as this:

"'Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had mastered the masters that he broke tradition and became Picasso.  He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn't enough.  Technical skill is never enough.  He needed to find his voice.  We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it.  The technical stuff needs to become second nature.'  Everyone agreed with this part too.  Wilson said quietly to me, 'You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.'  I stopped drawing.  Wilson went on: 'I used to go to art classes with him.  He was always trying to break away from classical form.' 

One of the ladies spoke up.  'Sylvester Stallone, the actor?'

'That's right.  He's a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.'  Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit.  Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy.  'He did write Rocky, after all.'" (122-123)

Stallone did receive his BFA from the University of Miami in 1999, but this excerpt may be apocryphal.  Regardless, Franco's enthusiasm for literature is not likely to be questioned by anyone.  Though I would not be surprised if I am in the minority in my praise of this work.  I judge it according to the standards of my former classmates in creative writing classes.  If one of them had submitted such materials, I would have put them in the class of the top three or four (among the 70 or 80 total) that deserved to have their work published.  Unfortunately, not all of us have the advantage of taking classes taught by Amy Hempel, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Lethem, or Dave Eggers.  Or Joyce Carol Oates for that matter....   

The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley

This is the first graphic novel to be reviewed on Flying Houses, but (pseudo-oeuvre rule.....I mean, genre rule!) I have read Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, and Horror Hospital Unplugged by Dennis Cooper.  "Horror Hospital Unplugged" was included in short story form in the collection Wrong, and though I did not review that book, I read it shortly before this book http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/userlands-new-fiction-writers-from.html, which inspired me to start Flying Houses.  So, it is not unreasonable to assume that Flying Houses will start to offer more reviews of graphic novels, because wow, they can be a lot more fun than straight up fiction.

I couldn't get into Jimmy Corrigan as much as I could Horror Hospital Unplugged.  Both were depressing.  But JC was just kind of boring to me, whereas HHU contained all the insanity of Dennis Cooper's other books.  However, I recognize that JC is a work of art, and that Ware is clearly going for something different than your typical graphic novel (though I cannot really say I am an expert on the genre, by any stretch!): it's not really plot-driven, a lot of it is just extraordinarily elaborate art, content is sort of minimal though there are interesting forays into the history of Chicago--I can't really remember what it's about?  He has a sister, and their father is dying or something?  I can't remember.  Of course, I remember HHU is about a punk band with a singer who is gay and seems largely modeled off of Nirvana--or at least a parody of Nirvana-imitation-bands.

The Dark Knight Returns is my favorite of the three.  I believe I have mentioned on Flying Houses that I am planning on making a shot-by-shot remake of the original Batman, the 1989 version directed by Tim Burton, and I have been studying the film, and the special features on the DVD in order to understand how best to make a low-budget version.  The Dark Knight Returns and Killing Joke are both mentioned as major influences on the "darkness" of the film, which dissociated themselves from "Batman the Comedian," played by Adam West, but not from the original spirit of the comics created by Bob Kane.

Bob Kane said he loved these two books, and Killing Joke will be reviewed shortly (as soon as I buy it).  I devoured The Dark Knight Returns-started it on Monday and finished it on Tuesday.  It's about 200 pages long, but densely packed with action.  Maybe I didn't study the illustrations closely enough to understand what was going on towards the end, which is my chief complaint with the book.

The richness and complexity of the work, however, is what makes it classic.  It was actually assigned to me as required reading for a course I took at NYU called "Writing New York," which, obviously, studied the concept of New York as represented in literature.  And Gotham City is, basically, New York in this.  There are references to the Twin Towers of Gotham, there is a reference to Bay Ridge, and there are a few other obvious signs that Gotham City is New York City.


This book takes place in present-day Gotham City, which was 1986, and Ronald Reagan (or at least a character very similar to him) is President, and plays a somewhat prominent role in the story.  And this book is deeply political, and complex.  It's sort of funny--I asked my older brother last weekend why Superman and Batman hated each other.  He responded that Superman was a Republican and Batman was a Liberal.and a lot of this book suggests that.


I am going to avoid the temptation of spoiling the story for you, except to say that Batman is 55 years old, and 10 years retired, Commissioner Gordon is 70 years old and weeks away from retirement, Harvey Dent/Two Face is about to be released from Arkham Asylum, a gang called The Mutants have overrun Gotham City with crime, and there's a female Robin.  


I won't reveal anymore, because I had such a good time anticipating what might happen in this story.  Let me just say it is action-packed and beautifully written.  It doesn't lend itself easily to excerpting, so I will not attempt any.  Sometimes it is hilarious.  It is also pretty vulgar and gruesome.  It's definitely not for little kids.  


I love Batman more than ever and want to read all the best comics about him.  I loved it, and highly recommend it, except for those that are easily confused or don't have the patience to figure out what order to follow the panels in.  I would only say Book Four is the one that really started to lose me.  It was awesome, but I sort of had no idea what was going on.  

Closer - Dennis Cooper

We follow up one re-read with another in what will not be a continuing trend (our next item is the much-anticipated Imperial Bedrooms, referenced quite a long time ago on Flying Houses, here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/05/informers-bret-easton-ellis.html?) with Closer, what could be considered Dennis Cooper's breakout novel, published in 1989. This preceded Frisk, and later Try. They form a trilogy which can be considered his strongest work.

In the same way Ziggy is the central figure of Try, George Miles is at the center of Closer. However, the story is not as narrowly-focused, which distracts, but also allows the work to delve into a few experimental episodes that coalesce and form its own unique symmetry. There are eight relatively short chapters in 131 pages with seven narrators, or protagonists in what could be considered short stories, all of which link. This is definitely a novel, though.

John, where the novel starts, draws portraits of his classmates, and gets involved physically with them. He meets George Miles, who takes several tabs of acid every day and smokes grass in between and keeps a shrine to Disneyland in his bedroom. Sex ensues, thoughts of violence ensue, and then they end up meeting a punk who goes with them into a purportedly haunted house and then later the punk describes his predicament:

"'Hurt me,' he yelled in a hoarse voice. 'Fuck me up and I'll never forget you. I really fucking love violence. I want to tell all my friends what we did so they'll hate me or call me a fag or whatever, but fuck them. I'm not a poser like they are. I want to do everything so when I die they'll say I lived and tell bad jokes about me but who cares. I like getting crazy and you seem okay. Anyway, why not?'" (10)

The second chapter is narrated by David, who believes he is a pop star, or fantasizes about it often enough to become his fractured reality. The novel shifts its tone and voice drastically in this chapter and becomes a bit humorous, while still very dark. David is paranoid and talkative, the chapter is breezy, and it serves as a nice transition between the 1st and 3rd chapters.

The 3rd chapter is George's first chapter, and in it he describes getting asked to leave school one day, hitchhiking, getting picked up by a carpenter, more sex, going to a school dance, smoking a joint with his teacher, who is a closet case, and then later meeting Philippe. The segments with Philippe are the point at which Closer tips the obscenity scales at 10. Philippe has a particularly gross fetish that is four letters long and starts with the letter s. That is all I will say about that. But it does become an important plot point.

The next two chapters are 1st and 3rd person alternately with Cliff and Alex, who are more of the same, basically--they are friends, and they watch old scary movies together, sometimes they smoke pot together, they talk about George Miles, and how obsessed they are with him (as does everyone), and then there is always more sex. Cliff watches Philippe perform his act with George, and then later tells Alex about it, who wants to recreate it for a project in his film class. Later an accident happens.

George's second chapter comes next, and it has the probable climax of the novel in his encounter with Tom, who attempts to kill him, because that is what he understood their meeting to mean.

Philippe is the next chapter, and in it he describes the root of his perversion in relatively original prose, such as the interior-dialogue he has with himself as he tries to sleep:

"'What are you feeling, Philippe?' Tired. 'Then you should sleep.' But I am too tense; I keep thinking. 'What kind of thinking?' Well, everything. 'Of Georges?' Some. He represents something I have desired for a long time. 'How long?' Since before I came to America.
'Why did you come?' I came because in my own country I felt afraid. 'Of what?' Everything, but mainly of myself. I was beginning to want what I could not have. 'Can you be more clear?' No. When I try, my beliefs or desires come out beautiful. They are beautiful to me, but I cannot understand them in that form.
'You wanted to kill someone?' That is too simple. I thought about killing someone, though I did not know who. My ideas about death are very beautiful, so I wanted to think about killing a beautiful person. 'A boy?' Yes. 'And you could not find him there?' I could not find myself there. I was known as what I am not.
'Who are you?' I am trying to find this out. It is hard. I am driven to do certain things, and I believe they are helping me, because they seem strong. 'Why Georges?' He makes me feel something. I do not know this answer. 'He has been hurt?' Yes. 'By someone you know?' Yes." (109-110)

The novel's final chapter is narrated by Steve, who starts a nightclub called the Forefront in his parent's four-car garage. Later he meets George, and then an accident occurs, and the novel ends, in fairly effective order.

If there's anything to criticize about this book, it would be its subject matter, but that is a discussion I don't care to offer. I think it's unfair. More to the point: this novel meanders. Sometimes the meandering is great, and Cooper will find some new way to say something simple, in a sentence that the reader feels they might have read before, but with a word or two exchanging positions in order that changes the meaning. Other times, when a new narrator enters the picture, the reader can feel that they're losing the story, or missing the point. My first time reading it, I didn't like it as much.

The second time, I must admit it seems much longer than its 131 pages, but is consistent all the way through, and offers many quotable passages, as deranged as they may be. One of my favorites is more innocent though--it is George's declaration to change his life, in his diary:

"'I'm going to use this to make myself change, like a starting point. I think that's the best thing to do. I won't buy any more drugs. I'll try not to do what I always do. I never do anything other than school and Philippe.
'Tomorrow I'll clean up my room and make it look like a normal place. I think I'll burn all my Disneyland stuff so I can't change my mind. Nobody else was ever interested in the stuff anyway and all my feelings for it are destroyed by the drugs now.
'I called Cliff tonight, just to talk. He doesn't care anymore. He kept saying how cute David was. I guess they're in love. He said that David is sort of obsessed or whatever with me. I don't know why, but it pisses him off. I hung up.
'It's strange I'm not sad about Mom. I guess it took such a long time I felt everything I could feel already. I wish I hadn't been there, but I'm glad the last person she looked at was me. She really loved me once. Likewise, I guess.
'I think I'm afraid of stuff. Maybe that's it. I was afraid Mom would die, but now she has and it's okay. I can't let it stop me from doing things. I'm going to keep that in mind from now on. I mean it." (97)

Closer envisions an alternate reality of sex and violence that many will find shocking, and while it does not reach the heights of Try, it is nearly as good as Frisk, and a decent enough introduction to Cooper's work. It's definitely above-average, but something about it does seem longer--and there is something else worth noting: compared to the rest of the work in Cooper's oeuvre, it seems bland in some way. Like, there is no defining factor that makes it memorable.

For me, this isn't exactly true, but I could see how others might regard it in this light. The final chapter in particular, and the idea of the Forefront, stuck enough in my mind to imagine a parallel setting in my second novel. All of Cooper's work in general influenced my writing it, but several details reminded me of specific scenes, or even phraseology that I would later use, that were pleasures to re-discover. Though it is not a pleasurable read! Reading any of Cooper's books is not a pleasant experience, but it can also be cathartic in ways few other books can match.

Ugly Man - Dennis Cooper

Ah, finally Dennis Cooper came out with a new book. I never read The Sluts because the cover looked too gay to me. Maybe it is good, I don't know. But I've read everything else by him, and Ugly Man is average in comparison with the rest. It is certainly different. It's definitely far more comic than anything else he has ever put out.

The closest reference point for this book would be Wrong, his collection of short stories published in 1992. Since that year, his star has grown bright, and he is probably more popular than ever before, thanks in no small part to his blog. I first read Try in 2003, followed quickly by Guide, then later My Loose Thread, Frisk, and Closer. For a while I didn't read anything by him, convinced the rest was not necessarily worth it--but God Jr. came out relatively recently, and that was interesting to see a different side of the writer. Finally while in L.A., I capped things off with Period and Wrong, later re-reading Try, which is the only other book by him reviewed on this blog http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/05/try-dennis-cooper.html. Now I want to read Guide again because I look back upon the part of his oeuvre that I have read, and I feel compelled to rank it in this order:

1) Try
2) Frisk
3) My Loose Thread
4) Guide
5) Closer
6) God Jr.
7) Ugly Man
8) Wrong
9) Period

And if you were to include Userlands, his anthology of online literature (the impetus for this blog, and its 12th post, http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/userlands-new-fiction-writers-from.html), it would rank beneath Period, probably. I could discuss them all, but let's keep things on Ugly Man, because there is a lot to discuss. Basically, I think it is better than Wrong, while still being very similar, because of the strength of a few of its pieces that go beyond 70% of the rest of the material--in particular, "Jerk," "The Worst (1960-1971)," and the powerful, closing "The Ash Gray Proclamation." Mostly it consists of really short pieces, varying in length from one paragraph to three pages. Flash fiction, I guess.

Sometimes the really short pieces work ("The Boy on the Far Left," "Graduate Seminar," and "Brian aka 'Bear'") and other times they just bleed into each other and seem pretty pointless. "Knife/Tape/Rope" is pretty decent as far as the other pieces that avoid categorization--or rather, fit neatly into the preconceptions of what a short story should appear to be. "The Hostage Drama" is another example of something that works in the end.

But pretty much everything else winds up sounding like an echo of Wrong--and what went wrong with it, pardon the pun. Which is that, forced to work within the confines of a smaller piece, much of Cooper's work loses its emotional impact and instead more closely approaches "torture porn," as with the shorter pieces the torture and the porn are introduced rather quickly, and violently, abruptly cut off. The plot is practically the same for every single one of these pieces--sexually confused teenage boy wants to die, and he happens to find friends that get off by murdering and raping him at the same time, and then sometimes the story will shift to the perspective of his executors. That is what this entire work is "about," so to speak, the nature of sex and violence, taken to the extreme example.

While we are on the topic of obscenity, what with Ulysses being one of our most recent posts, let me just say that Ugly Man, like the rest of Cooper's work excluding God Jr., which is practically family-friendly, would rate a 10 on the obscenity scale, which makes it more obscene than Naked Lunch, primarily because it makes sense.

One piece deserves special note--"The Anal Retentive Line Editor," which is probably the most exasperating thing in the book. It is like the centerpiece of the collection, and probably one of its longest pieces. It is funny, it is clever, and some may enjoy it immensely, but for me it got old rather quickly--though some of Cooper's self-consciousness makes it one of the highlights of any of his work, period.

The most pleasant surprise about Ugly Man, however, is the "P.S." feature at the end of the book, which is sort of like a DVD extra, brought by Harper Perennial. It seems that Cooper has hit the big time with this kind of attention--I've only previously seen one of these in Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer." And this one was much cooler. It has an interview with Cooper, by one of his fans, of whom Cooper is also a fan, apparently (Robert Gluck), and most interestingly, lists of his top 50 poems, top 50 songs by Robert Pollard, top 50 songs in general (which includes songs by Robert Pollard also), top 50 novels, and top 50 films, I think, in no particular order. This was easily the best part of the book. The interview provides the most quotable material:

"Well I guess I did become the writer I imagined I'd be, didn't I? My work seems to mean a lot to a certain kind of young person, and I get a lot of really moving e-mails and letters from young writers who say my work inspires them to write. So I guess your theory makes sense. Of course I never imagined the whole publishing world nonsense and the difficulty of cracking the literary establishment and the lack of financial reward for being this kind of writer. But, yeah, when I'm discouraged by the insurmountable problems that my work creates for itself and for me, realizing that I've achieved what I dreamed of achieving keeps me on track." (4, P.S.)

As if that were not enough there are also five poems by Cooper. Basically, I don't recommend this if this is your first time reading him--but I think fans of his will find much to like about it. I do think it is better than Wrong, and certainly Period, which threatened to collapse under its overwhelming desire to experiment. Ugly Man is experimental, but in a way that adapts the present climate of fiction, which has moved increasingly towards this "flash" thing--something between a poem and a story. Cooper may not be the master of this genre yet, but he has certainly added his own personal stamp to it, and on that basis alone, much of what he has created can exist comfortably alongside more celebrated short, short fiction.

I really hope that he comes out with a new novel soon, though. That would be cool. If I could I would read his blog and ask him to read S/M, because I never would have written it if it weren't for reading his work.

Try - Dennis Cooper

Of all the books that friends could recommend you, Try may be the most hit-or-miss. You may have a friend tell you to read it, and you may end up hating that person forever. Alternately, you may have a friend tell you to read it, and you may think that person is really fucked up, but you’ve probably already taken the time to understand them, so instead you are just, concerned. In the last case, you’re told to read it, you do, you are blown away, you do not think about modern literature quite the same way again, and you decide, even if they’re not as good, you want to read the rest of Cooper’s books.

Oeuvre rule: I shared an apartment in Paris with a girl who had The Hipster Handbook, which was mostly a joke-text, but which did pin down the Williamsburg-type to a T. However, some elements of hipsters struck me as oft-kilter, namely the “hippest authors,” which included your usual bunch (Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Kerouac I think…) but placed Cooper at the #1 position and simply said, “Hipsters have read all of Cooper’s novels.” I find this hard to believe. I can count on one hand the number of people I know that are familiar with his work. Now, all five of those people may be hipsters, but I know more than five hipsters. This really doesn’t matter at all. My point is, Cooper is 55, Try was published in 1994, and if you don’t know who he is by now, then you probably won’t hear of him in the future, though that is up for debate, as one of his more recent texts, God Jr. has him flirting with the mainstream. You can find that volume in many mass-market arenas, but you will almost never find Try anywhere except in a library.

In my opinion, Try is Cooper’s definitive volume, at least so far. His other books explore similar terrain, but always with a focus on violence that at times I find confusing. Try is an extremely violent book, and contains at least three scenes that will make you audibly gasp. I found myself surprised that I took everything in stride until the penultimate scene in the novel, when I had to groan for a graphic description of “fisting.” However, this is my second time reading it. The first time was in Paris, and with a bottle of wine. The second time was in Silver Lake, and with a bottle of wine. Both times it was read in one evening. I feel it is appropriate to read the novel this way because all of the characters get so fucking messed up through the course of its 200 pages that you don’t feel so left out if you’re getting shitfaced as you’re activating the text with your mind. Also, it may make you cry more easily. I did not cry last night. I cried this morning (for different reasons, but probably because of some of the emotional turmoil left over from reading it last night). Try is extremely emotional. The last two pages are about as good as the last two pages of anything else I’ve read. You’d think I’m fucking crazy if I described this as a “tender” book, but on the second reading, that side of it seems more apparently resonant than the violent aspect.

A note on structure seems prudent, as Try is one of Cooper’s least –structured and most predictably forward-moving novels. There are several different “perspectives” that break up the text into chapters of sorts, though the action takes place over the course of two or three (really) crazy days. Upon reflection, it is not all the different from my first novel, except there are way less characters here, and there is nothing so pretentious as separate chapter titles for each different character perspective about to push through the next several pages of the story. No, the perspectives are Ziggy’s, Calhoun’s, Roger’s, Ken’s, and that’s sort of it. You go back between those four characters—the main one, his best friend, his father (the only one in first-person POV), his uncle—with a nearly symmetrical precision until all of the energy contained within the work is used up and exhausted.

Regardless of the deeper implications of the text, the story in Try is clearly its most salient element. The majority of Cooper’s other volumes sacrifice some level of story in favor of abstraction. Or else, their stories tend to be too similar. Frisk seems to have a very intricate story drawn up around it, but while it may boast an intelligent structure, the “page-turner” aspect is not quite the same. Do not get me wrong—while Try may be a page turner, it is not destined for Oprah’s Book Club. Giving away the story probably ruins a few surprises, but I will summarize it quickly anyways: Ziggy is 16, obsesses over Husker Du, edits a zine entitled I Apologize, a Magazine for the Sexually Abused, lives with his father Brice, rarely goes to school, when he does it is only to see Annie, a drug dealer who supply things with names like Superchunk, has a best friend named Calhoun who is a year older than him and so has graduated high school, but is only working part-time in a record store and is a massive junkie who slowly writes fiction, has an uncle named Ken who spends the entire novel sexually mutilating a thirteen-year-old Slayer fanatic on film, and finally has another father named Roger, who is a rock critic in New York, and who has decided that he is going to take Ziggy back with him, all while being somewhat overly-obsessed with “rimming.”

The subject matter is obviously a bit rough and sketchy. However, few books tend to take up this material so head-on. Anybody interested in figuring out the long term (though the work mainly deals in the short-term) effects of sexual abuse would be well-served to begin here, as there are few other novels to deal in it so unflinchingly. What is different is the complicity, the realism, the lack of options, the truly confused state. Anyone who has in fact been sexually abused would no doubt reap a great benefit from reading this text, even if it may force them to revisit painful memories. However, in that potential case one risks becoming fixated on Ziggy, perhaps the only character one could clearly state “is more fucked up than you are.” The part that makes the novel a masterpiece though, is that, despite how fucked-up Ziggy is from everything life has given him, he doesn’t complain, he does what he has to, and he does not give up on his search for happiness. Try is life-affirming in its own extremely fucked up way.

The fact that it is fiction lends the outside world the same appearance after reading it. It seems so, so made-up. It’s totally not realistic at all—at least the Ken sub-plot is completely absurd, unless you’re trying to say there are still more Gacys and Dahmers left that the world will never know about. But even though it’s ridiculous, even though few people will find themselves caught up in a situation like Ziggy’s (as atypical a nuclear family scenario as is practically possible), you cannot help but be moved to attempt to glean something from the text. One can dismiss the book in the first place, saying it’s “pulpy” or something, but Cooper never exactly stops writing about his characters like they’re still real human beings, and for that there is a whole world of understanding that can be brought out of his literature. I recommend reading Try while getting your choice of really-fucked-up, alone in your dwelling.

Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground - Ed. Dennis Cooper

Userlands is an excellent concept that goes perhaps a mile too far in its ambitions. That does not stop it from being of critical importance to everything that has ever had the slightest thing to do with Flying Houses, for it was during my first night reading this volume that I decided I must have my own blog. I was tired of being expected to produce content appropriate for other people's businesses, companies, ideas and "projects." Flying Houses, I decided, would be an appropriate starting point for a track towards accomplishment in literature.

Userlands, effectively, is the anti-Best American Short Stories of 2007. Anyone who has ever tried to push their way through one of those collections without prior knowledge of the contributors is in for a bumpy ride. Undoubtedly, you will find a couple of very memorable, nay even classic stories, which you would asterisk in the table of contents and pass along to a friend as the only pieces worth reading...Userlands is a very similar experience, except the success rate is a bit lower. Oh, and the content takes a bit of getting used to.

The first thing to praise about this book is Dennis Cooper's preface, which describes how he started his own blog, and how tons of people started posting comments as a way to start corresponding with him, and how he discovered all the different young writers of today who posted their work on their blogs. It is an inspiring set of consequences and coincidences, and perhaps predicts the future of literature. Or at least, a more adventerous future than the one we are currently on track for. I felt the boil in my blood subside when I read Cooper's state-of-the-union-esque comment in his opening piece, "This is Not an Isolated Incident":

"It's not exactly a revelation to say that book publishing in the United States is in a gentrified, conservative, and economics-driven state. The contemporary fiction known to the majority of book buyers and reviews readers is a highly filtered thing composed for the most part of authors carefully selected from the graduating classes of university writing programs that have formed a kind of official advisory board to the large American publishing houses. To read that allotted fiction and look no further, it would be easy to believe contemporary English-language fiction has become a far less adventerous medium than music or art or film or other forms that continue to welcome the young and unique and bold. Userlands offers one alternative to the status quo, one unobstructed view of contemporary fiction at its real, unbridled, vigorous, percolating best." (12-13, italics mine)

What a disappointment, then, when perhaps 20% of the 41 stories Cooper has selected, are the only ones worth reading! Now, I have the opportunity to act like I am a literary agent, or a publishing house slush pile reader, or a member of the advisory board of a literary journal. Of course, maybe 10% of these stories would qualify for journal publication (and that 10% would not include the 20% that I think is worth reading). First of all, we should do a slight oeuvre rule concerning Cooper. Of course, his books skew towards a rather extreme edge of fiction, and the writers he picks sometimes imitate his content and style. Perhaps predictably, these 15% or so that ape his style comprise the majority of successful literary experiments. Much of the rest of the time (several stories packed together at what appears to be the direct middle of the 360 page collection) I found myself skimming through the stories, or not caring at all about weird, purposefully vague, "hazy," text-blocking, Borges-imitating stories falling under the "experimental" genre. But for every "Five Stories About Trains" (which opens the collection) or "Saliva" or "The Before and the Plastic Dinosaurs" (which seems like it's missing a word) or "Lycanthropy Wife (better get your dictionary)," there is a "Fantastic, Made of Plastic," (not very different from a story I once wrote) or "I Don't Know What This Means," (a beautiful rendition of a "soft apocalypse") or "Spatial Devices Can Take Any Form," (which is vulgar, yet entertaining Cooper-copying). There are a disconcerting number of "serialized" pieces or numbered or ridiculously-structured pieces. A few stories deserve a bit of a deeper mention though.

The first is James Champagne's harangue on Barnes and Noble, "Kali Yuga," which is either the worst or best piece in this book (and I vote for worst). True, we are immediately in familiar territory. Everyone has been in Barnes and Noble. And probably Borders too (who imitates whom I cannot see). And yes, I have known a person who worked at Barnes and Noble (though it might have been Borders) and complained about, but generally tolerated/liked it. I think he would appreciate this story, but he would also admit that the kid is complaining a little too much. Of course, I've hated every job I've ever had, but most of the things he complains about are simply too ridiculous to care about. They seem made up, but if confronted I am sure he would say he told 100% of the truth. Or, he never worked there and he just imagined what it would be like. Regardless of its pleasurable or painful qualities, "Kali Yuga" is undoubtedly the seminal piece of literature ABOUT Barnes and Noble culture. Surprising, considering the only other reference I can think to that behemoth was in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind..."

"Sixteen" by Robert Siek is not an excellent story but works in very familiar territory--party at an NYC industrial goth nightclub--and is really only about having fun. I noticed this story beyond the others because it reminded me of things I had written, and really reminded me in particular of something a friend once wrote, and who had it published in a journal. Thus, writing a story about a contained set of scenes in a bar or club without anything really serious happening at the end might be a good way to get your first piece published. Unfortunately, that does not allow the content to get very deep usually, especially when stories end with groups of characters smiling for photos saying "DRUGS!" instead of "Cheese!"

The two stories that close out Userlands are, perhaps on purpose, the two best stories in the collection from beginning to end. Will Fabro's "Duels" nearly made me jump out of my skin from how much I was able to identify with in the work. It was as if Fabro had taken a peak at my second novel, laughed at it, and wrote this story as a parody of it. Regardless, my second novel is much more dangerous than "Duels," and is not so nearly as perfectly contained.

"My Body's Work" by Matthew Williams could double as a pitch-perfect imitation of a long short story or novella by Cooper, and in any case is by far and way the best thing in this collection. It may be complete fiction, or it may be completely true (I am veering towards believing it is 100% made up) but regardless it will not fail to hold your attention from beginning to end. It may be a bit gimmicky, but that is its easiest quality to critique. It is one of those crazily over-structured pieces, but here all the separation by numbers and varieties of storytelling approaches do not seem superfluous. It may be slightly gimmicky, but regardless Williams's story (or "confession") is the most essential piece in the book.

And there are many other stories I won't soon forget, but most of them I will. Still, not bad for a first edition. The Userlands concept should be passed down like a torch from successful underground writer to succesful underground writer, or at least re-surveyed by Cooper himself every few years. While it may not be 100% satisfying, this tome is quite a gift to aspring writers and lovers of left-of-center literature and most of all to the literary industry. Sadly, it is a gift that anybody who ISN'T "underground" will fail to notice.

Hunting Accidents: A Brief History of Guided by Voices - James Greer

There are only a few bands to have "made it" that may give non-musical aspiring singers, guitar players, drummers and other instrumentalists hope that their "meaningless noise" may find the audience to appreciate its genius: the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, Beat Happening, Sebadoh, Pavement, and Guided by Voices. The latter three were lumped together into the "lo-fi" nametag, applied to capitalize on the truly innovative ways of that middle band. Sebadoh's earliest recordings date to the mid-80's, Pavement's earliest recordings date to the late 80's, and GBV's earliest recordings date to the early 80's. None of these bands featured the typical accoutrements of standard. debaucherous rock and roll bands. GBV, however, came closest to approximating that cliche.

But this is not a review of that band, this is a review of the book about that band, which came out not long after the biography on Modest Mouse and the proliferation of the 33 1/3 book series, featuring a volume on Bee Thousand. Modest Mouse is not a bad comparison point, as they toiled for years in indie obscurity before the breakthrough of "Float On" (no disrespect to MM, but one of their hokiest songs to date) in 2003. Likewise, GBV toiled in obscurity through the 80's, had little reason to retain confidence, stopped playing live, decided to record one last album to put all their musical ambitions to rest, were "discovered" on the basis of that album (Propeller), gained more confidence, made more albums, and eventually settled on the classic Bee Thousand in 1994 which won them a legion of fans for the rest of eternity, but still didn't make them as a big a name as say, The Strokes, who would champion them in 2001 when it would appear it should have been the reverse. Nevertheless, Alien Lanes, Mag Earwhig!, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, Do the Collapse....through Half Smiles of the Decomposed, their final album, all featured songs generally better than anything else released in those years, but still filtered through the "weird" mentality of their hyper-prolific, borderline-alcoholic frontman (R. Pollard, God to James Greer) so that relatively few people cared enough to notice.

Hunting Accidents begins inauspiciously. There is an "Introduction" which is one of the most fawning, ill-advised screeds ever to open a book of rock journalism (that I've read). Even Steven Soderbergh's reasons why you should like GBV seems a little forced. A book about a band that is not known to everyone but for the few that do know the truth that they really are the greatest band never to be acknowledged (i.e, GBV or the Fall) need not try to convince the reader as to their greatness. The Introduction ends up getting repeated later throughout the book, and the whole thing would be much improved if it were edited out in the final review.

Because after the introduction, this is a pretty good rock history book. Like a good book on Nirvana, or Our Band Could be Your Life, Greer makes it feel as if you actually knew Pollard and his brother and his crazy friends and that you were right there in the garage recording studio they often used with them (and I'm not just saying that as a cliched line of praise--the realism of this book on what it takes to be a band when barely anyone else cares is its most singularly impressive quality). There are plenty of good gossip stories about GBV and Pollard and other bands. The Breeders in particular are given a fair share of the spotlight, as they were the first band to champion Pollard and his gang, probably because they shared his hometown of Dayton, OH. Later on Kim Deal offers to produce a GBV album, and when they actually get down to the recording of it, sad antics ensue, and the story of what could have been a fantastic collaboration but never was comes to light. Deal and Pollard would be an interesting couple of indie rock stars to compare, but this is also not the place for that. There is also a story of how GBV and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists got into a brawl after a show they played together, which truly shocked me as I always felt Ted Leo seemed like the coolest guy on Earth. Now, Robert Pollard may be the coolest guy on Earth too, and it is just too hard for me to pick which band I like better, so I prefer to think this altercation was a result of alcoholic misinterpretation rather than anyone truly being an asshole.

About two-thirds of the way through Hunting Accidents, Dennis Cooper makes a surprising cameo (but not really considering Guide had a chapter titled "Guided by Voices" and quoted a line from "Awful Bliss," and considering the cover of Horror Hospital Unplugged contains the line, "Are you amplified to rock?") to extol the virtues of GBV, not unlike Steven Soderbergh, but with more elaborate praise, even going so far as to call Robert Pollard the greatest songwriter of all time. True, anyone familiar with Pollard will know that he has written and recorded hundreds, maybe thousands of songs, and that each one of them is unique in its own way. Greer is not wrong to have picked GBV as a suitable band to document non-fiction style, but he is wrong when he falls back on other's praise as if to say, "See! Other people like them too! They really are good!"

Regardless of all the superfluous attempts at converting the reader into a GBV psycho, by the time you get to the Electrifying Conclusion Tour and the final show on New Year's Eve 2004 at the Metro in Chicago, you will probably be sad that you were not there (I was because that night I was doing nothing in Lake Forest, IL, and was very sad).

One of the more interesting segments of the book details the recording of Do the Collapse (which incidentally, caused me to buy an 8 dollar used copy of that CD from Amoeba Music) with Ric Ocasek, who seems to champion bands like crazy too (Bad Brains, Weezer). Of course, "Teenage FBI" is a classic GBV song, and the first one I ever heard, and the rest of that album is very excellent, but Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records, who had begun to distribute GBV in the wake of Bee Thousand, gives the most interesting take on it. He also gives the best interviews in the book. First, he mentions how they had to have an intervention with Pollard, which he felt bad about because he admits he had his own problems with substance abuse (the difference between him and Clive Davis) because some of their shows had dissolved into alcohol-induced sloppiness.

Second, he goes into this great diatribe about the song "Hold on Hope" off Do the Collapse. He says he thought Do the Collapse was a really amazing album, except for "Hold on Hope," which he thought was a really embarassing song. Pollard almost admits as much, but also says he just wanted to write something genuine and uplifting. Strangely enough, Cosloy is embarassed because he was afraid "Hold on Hope" would get played on the radio. I think he didn't want people to be introduced to GBV through that uncharacteristic song, or something. But the whole discussion about that one particular song is priceless.

And there are deeper analyses to many other songs, some of which Pollard explicitly reveals the subject matter on, such as "Teenage FBI." This is great for any fan, but probably pointless to any with just a cursory knowledge of them.

And that last sentence probably illustrates the value of this book. But also worth noting (and surprising) is that Pollard was married and had children at an early age, and so has a son who is now 27 or so who contributes 3 vignettes to the book, which are hilarious just thinking about what it would be like to have such a ridiculous father.