It’s Not Happening

Two RCMP gents are getting married today, hooray! Their eternal nickname: Brokeback Mounties!  Tremendous.

David Foster Wallace seems to polarize readers.  I am certainly a partisan, though I found some of the stories in his latest collection to be just a little too precious or overwritten — the very traits loathed by those who noisily loathe his work.  Am I getting less patient, or is he publishing lesser work?  I know for a fact that I am getting cranky in my middle age, as all Lightners do, so I’ll play it safe and stop there.

The reader should probably not just barrel through it sequentially and unceasingly, as I did.  I found that the stories I disliked didn’t get any better by the time I turned the last page, so you may want to cut and run if you find yourself yawning or rolling your eyes.  But the good ones, like the closing piece “The Suffering Channel,” keep getting better all the way through.

In that story, he recycles a notion from Infinite Jest that seems important to him in a deep way: the undescribed or indescribable artwork that has the same, quite intense, effect on each viewer. This need for universality may be conservative or religious or liberal or humanist, but it is also creepy and unsettling and a little cute-innocent at the same time. In Wallace’s world there is something the same about all of us that transcends mere biology, and it can be expressed simply, if accidentally.
So: read it for the engaging brain games, or read it for the human mystery. What, you want more?

Science fiction, speculative fiction, slipstream, etc. — all that stuff that we eat up despite its genrification by the publishing indistry — possesses a quality that attracts smarties and puts off dumbos: rules-bending. We get to feel the glow of getting an A+ when we figure out that people live forever or that robots have feelings or whatever, while most readers, legitimately, would rather not have to figure out how to read each new book or story.  Kelly Link’s stories take us through the meta and into a kind of suspension of analysis that brings to mind a feeling of readiness and heightened awareness that used to come only from transcendent description.

Stranger Things Happen is Link’s second collection.  Some stories are more giving than others when it comes to why the strange things are happening, and those tend to be the weakest (though still as uncomfortably charming as that quiet weirdo everyone knew or was in high school). The best, like Stone Animals and the title story, resolutely refuse to confirm or deny any particular theory of what’s really going on, yet seduce the reader into caring for the characters — if they really are characters — and giving up the role of reader for the more passive, but engaged, role of listener.  I expect that Link’s stories would be even more wonderful when read aloud.  Good, quiet, puzzling, just scrutable enough to keep us coming back.

Lipstick Traces has always been one of those iconic never-read books to me, seeming more intimidating and promising than it could really be, like War and Peace or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I perversely took it with me to Mexico last fall, but didn’t get to it until the plane ride back. I ate up the first third or so, with its delicious retelling of the myth of the Sex Pistols, but then put it down for months after my return.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t hit by the bus in the interim, if for no other reason than the delight I harvested from Marcus’ clear-minded descriptions of other 20th-century punk moments that stepped outside of their histories. The short-lived Cabaret Voltaire and the Parisian strike of May ’68 share with the initial punk explosion a frantic desire to escape from the boredom and meaninglessness of our unimaginable affluence. But every time someone like Johnny Rotten screams “NO!” it takes only a few weeks or months for them to acquire a chorus of followers chanting “YES!” The pessimist says this means all revolutions are doomed to fail; the optimist insists that each momentary rejection lasts forever – that history can’t absorb anything that really matters.

And so: Today is Say ‘No’ Day. Be sure to say ‘no’ to someone you love.

Another awesome-looking kid’s show.  It looks like they took the Giant Robot plastic toy aesthetic and made it a little extra retarded – you know, for kids.  So good.

Check out the trailer. Biz Markie and the Paul Frank Monkey? Aw yeah.