The Awful Possibilities

one of the things about me is i have to finish the books i read. with novels that means straight through in a reasonable amount of time, even if sometimes i break in to read a story or some poems or even a shorter novel in the middle of it. with collections it’s actually a little trickier. i’ve mentioned before that i’ll try to drag out a collection i’m enjoying by an author i trust (for example, i still have one story to go in george saunders’s in persuasion nation), but with authors i’m unfamiliar with, i usually read collections quickly, for one of two reasons:

1. the book is rocking me, or at least compelling me to read on, or
2. the book is terrible but, like i said, i have a compulsion to finish the books i start

also, i read stories consecutively because i assume there’s a reason they’re in the order they’re in. think of it as the old album versus itunes argument. itunes serves its purpose (like publishing one-offs in journals and online does), but listening to a whole album, if it’s a good album, is a more powerful experience. i know i sound like an old man, a very wise old man with impeccable taste.

my brother and i used to make lists of every hip hop album that was excellent all the way through. these lists were always very short, but the best of them were greater than the sum of their parts. think gza’s liquid swords. i don’t know if any individual song on it would make my list of the top-ten rap singles of all time, but the album is far and away the best ever in hip hop and probably the best of its decade in any genre.

to apply this logic to short story collections, think brian evenson. a lot of his stuff, particularly his earlier stuff, can be so shocking as to seem almost splatter porn. as i worked my way through altmann’s tongue, i often questioned whether there was any redeeming value to certain of the stories, beyond the undeniable fact of evenson’s virtuosity (which would have justified the reading, but wouldn’t have placed him among the best writers of his generation), but by the end, it was clear to me that there was more than just beautiful descriptions of violence, that evenson was using them as means to, if not a moralistic, at least a philosophic, in an exploratory sense, end.

what was i getting at, anyway?

i’m thinking about these things a lot because me and the featherproof fellas are in the process of setting the awful possibilities in their final order.

go back and read that little list at the top.

i’ve read one of each type recently.

i don’t want to talk about the book of the latter type except to say these rules:

killer instinct

• quit making every story sound and be exactly the same. you’re not developing a fictional voice, you’re just fucking boring, and worse, demonstrating competence. one time this editor asked me to write a story and i wrote the story and then he edited the hell out of it. his edits were good. he edited it into a good story, a “competent” story. the thing is, i didn’t want it to be a good story, i wanted it to sound like what the narrator of the story would write. it was about a white high school kid in iowa who’s planning a school shooting because his brother is indoctrinating him with black nationalist ideology in an attempt to start a revolution. that kid’s voice should not sound like the voice in a “well-made story.”
• twenty-somethings can not be world-weary. okay, there are probably a handful of world-weary twenty-somethings, but here’s what i think — i think you went to grad school and studied under somebody who went to grad school and studied under somebody who went to grad school and studied under somebody middle-aged or older, who was maybe world-weary and maybe even had a reason to be, and who wrote about characters who were world-weary and had a reason to be.  i’m making up a new insult. i’m gonna call writers who do shit like this “A students.” i was describing this phenomenon to a friend at the coffee shop today and he said a sentence fragment, which was “second divorce.” exactly. you know what’s sillier than a story about a world-weary twenty-something getting a second divorce with an air of stoic despair? a whole collection of them.
• do not have a thing. at college, there was this girl who had purple hair and wore purple every day. also there was a guy who wrote in marker on his t-shirts.  each had a thing. do you really want to be compared to t-shirt boy and purple girl? i understand that this one can be tougher because part of getting books out there is marketing. when i was doing interviews for we go liquid, everybody wanted to talk to me about how the internet was affecting our lives. you just have to answer the questions. but that’s a lot different than randomly putting something in each story and pretending it gives your collection a theme.

this would be a good time to end the rules and move on to an example of the former kind of collection, the kind that rocks me or compels me to read on.

i was rocked and compelled to read on by lydia millet’s love in infant monkeys, which is funny, because you could argue that the collection breaks that last rule, that it has a “thing.” here’s the thing of it — each story (except for the last, which is a very pretty fable) pairs at least one animal with at least one public figure. take this title for example: “chomsky with rodents.”

this is a thing that’s been done a few times lately, and i think it’s interesting but potentially problematic. like john haskell’s i am not jackson pollock (and this is interesting because there’s even a topical overlap between a story in this collection and millet’s) or shelley jackson’s the melancholy of anatomy. both have very good — even brilliant — stories in them, but they also have at least as many stories in them that seem to have been written to pad the collection, to make a whole collection with the same theme.

this is a problem that millet does not have. every story is at least very good. in this sense, she transcends having a thing to have a theme, an accomplishment in itself, since it’s the first time i’ve seen it work.

there are, of course, fluctuations in quality. i was a little nervous after reading the first story, “sexing the pheasant” (which is about madonna on a pheasant hunt), that millet was playing for cheap laughs, but i decided that placing the story first must have been her way of easing the reader into the collection.

i decided this because it was followed by a really beautiful story called “girl and giraffe.” it’s about george adamson, one of the subjects of his wife’s book born free. born free is about the adamson’s and their lion. girl and giraffe is also about a lion, a lion named girl. the story tells about a hunting trip adamson (george, i mean) takes girl on where, before killing a giraffe foal, girl lies down and lets it play for a while.  after girl kills the giraffe, we get this:

Later, he said, he almost believed he had dreamed the episode. But he came to believe, over the years, that a call and answer had passed between Girl and the giraffe: the foal had asked for, and been granted, reprieve. Girl had given him a whole afternoon in which to feel the thorny branches and leaves in his mouth, the sun and shade cross his neck, his heavy lashes blink in the air.

It was a free afternoon, because all afternoon the foal had been free of the past and free of the future. Completely free.

here are the things i like about this passage:

first, obviously, the teleological notion of freedom here. it describes the only scenario i can imagine in which complete freedom is not the terrifying thing (instead, impending death is the potentially terrifying thing that gives freedom its beauty). that’s what jumped out at me when i read it.

but then if you look at the prose, it’s really interesting, even if it doesn’t announce itself that way. i like repetition. i mean, i really like it. but i didn’t notice at first that the word free was used four times in one sentence and a fragment. it seems somehow economical, like in this case repetition is the best way to get the point across succinctly.

also the use of the words “cross” and “blink” in the lyrical sentence that ends that first paragraph. the first verb in the descriptive series is “feel,” so rather than make gerunds of the following verbs, which i think most writers would have done, millet uses parallel forms throughout the sentence. it’s not flashy, but it’s distinct.

i need to figure out more about lydia millet. i suspect she might be a major (as in ability and accomplishment, not reputation) writer, but the bookstores around here only have a slim novel with the same title as a will self book i didn’t much like (though i often like will self), so i’ll keep looking around.

so i’ve been doing this thing for most of 2009, and a little while back i realized that meant i’d get to make my very own top 10 list soon. top 10 lists are usually pretty dumb (i mean, i’m almost never included), but i thought it would be fun to make one anyway.

then padgett powell comes along and ruins it, because his new novel? (question mark his, or ecco press’s), the interrogative mood, is hands down the best book of the year, and there’s just no point trying to create false suspense. anyway, i think there’s good reason to get the word out now.

why?

well, let’s start with you, and how unfaithful you’ve been to padgett powell. when was the last time you sat a friend down and forced a copy of one of powell’s books into his or her hand and then made sure that friend read it, at least for a minute, knowing full well he or she wouldn’t be able to stop? did you even notice that the man hasn’t released a book in nearly a decade?

if you’ve never insisted that someone read powell then i don’t really want to know you. but there is one convincing reason i can think of why you wouldn’t notice he hadn’t published a book in a long time, and that’s because the books he’s already put out are worth returning to again and again, and they remain fresh and exciting. still, it must have crossed your mind at some point, no? some little nagging in your soul? a powell-shaped hole that threatened to gape some summer afternoon?

i can’t really get on the new york times’s case this time. they published a good (i do think it was good, but it threatened, i think, to border on the sentimental with its hype-turned-underdog thesis) (oh yeah, the mention that powell has two unpublished collections — will someone get on top of that?) long profile and a posi-review.

my only complaint about the latter is the suggestion that his previous novels are “fictions of some lyrical force that suffered from rickety characters and unmoored plots.” this is a big complaint, but one i don’t want to get into here except to say this: one of the reasons that i’m an unabashed powell devotee is because his characters strike me as totally authentic in the same way that most characters that the times would describe as authentic strike me as inauthentic. for now we’ll have to agree to disagree, but one day i will return to teach you about the way people are.

an aside — just a few days before the review ran, i had beers with josh emmons, the fellow who wrote it, really by accident. we happened to be watching the phillies game at the same bar and had a friend there in common. alas, we only talked about the phillies and other things philadelphian, so i did not get the chance to set him straight on powell’s characters, as i did not know he had an opinion on them.

am i softening in my old age?

the book.

i've been here for years

don’t listen to them when they tell you the thing about the book is that it’s all in questions. it is all in questions, but that’s not the thing. besides, powell’s not the first to do that. ron silliman wrote a long piece all in questions. and gilbert sorrentino, i think. the thing about this is it’s all questions written by padgett powell, which means it’s sentences written by powell, and so it’s easy to lose track of the fact that they’re questions because you get wrapped up in the beauty of them and the humor and the brains.

so the book tends to alternate between quick, jab-like non sequiturs, like –

Do you understand exactly what sorghum is? If you had to be struck by lightning or by a car, which would it be? Will you use the phrase “forever and a day,” and will you deal with someone who uses it?

these were randomly chosen. the first question seems random (although it isn’t entirely random, as one of the themes that runs through the book is the tension between modern and traditional modes of living and whether modern people are capable of self-sufficiency) (sorghum being used for cultivation) (and also just before that, the narrator asks “Do you understand exactly what malt is?” — sorghum also being used to make booze) (thank you, wikipedia), and the second seems like the kind of question i might have used, misguidedly or not, on a first date. (it also points to a usage tendency — lightning and car are two different types of struck, and powell plays off of this aspect of language throughout.) the third question really starts to bring the narrator’s personality across, the final clause suggesting, even in the interrogative mood, that the questioner is the kind of person who might not deal with someone who uses the phrase “forever and a day.” probably we’d all like to think of ourselves as the type of person who wouldn’t associate with the type of person who would use the phrase, but are we the type of person who realizes it without being asked?

– and then longer questions that are like stories in themselves:

Does the word thumb impress you as somehow having a power or meaning beyond what it denotatively should have — I guess I mean, does it spook you a little, or sound totemic or talismanic, or maybe pornographic?

the fact that this question revolves around thumb (one of the things that makes us human) colors the meaning of the sentence. but it’s interesting that powell writes “the word thumb” as opposed to “thumb,” as language and analysis of language are also among the things that make us human. “spook,” “totemic,” “talismanic,” and “pornographic,” are all such idiosyncratic but also true and human responses to the word thumb that it makes it really hard to believe that anyone ever doubted powell’s ability with character, josh.

there’s more to this sentence, and really i could keep going on about it, but i’m starting to sound like a sycophant, so why don’t you just reread it and enjoy and then i’ll finish up.

okay, other sentences are longer and more obviously story-like, and you can find some of them on the internet. they are frequently beautiful in and of themselves, and even better in context — there are subtle and unsubtle themes and leitmotifs that run throughout to the point where i really did find myself asking how this book was composed, but only when i wasn’t reading it, because when i was reading it i was totally absorbed, no joke.

so writers — the contest for 2009 is decided. powell wins. you are now all vying for positions 2 through 9. and unfortunately for you, 2010 has already been decided (i hope you learn to speak french because i was speaking crazy bullshit about you 1 second ago) (and no, that link was not to my book — my book will have to be number 2 in 2010), but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep trying to impress me.

listen, y’all. i’ve been busy. busy at work and busy with book stuff. the featherproof guys have also been busy. we’ve been busy together. it’s good when we’re busy together. here is some evidence –

thanks, guys

see? it’s on its way, and it’s gonna be beautiful. and awful.

those of you who have  already ordered it will get it in the spring. those of you who want to order it now can do that. those of you who are still up in the air, go stare at that cover for a little while. it’s mystical, like the red triangle on a bottle of bass.

when you’ve come to your senses, add it on goodreads or one of those other ones and tell your friends. filibuster congress. nominate me for a macarthur fellowship.

okay, i’ve been reading good books. we’ll talk soon.