Drunken adventures in going blind

Book: Slackjaw

Author: Jim Knipfel

Pages: 231

Published: 1999 (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putman)

I like Jim Knipel, starting with his last name (you pronounce the K) and ending with the narrow fedora-shaded face in his author photo. He sounds like an excellent person to take to a bar and get drunk on a boring midweek night.

Which is exactly what his book feels like, a long tale spun frankly and wryly somewhere dark and smoky that tastes like beer. According to his roughly chronological stories, that’s exactly where most of them start or end up, launching or killing a long day of the author bouncing his cynical personal struggle against weird characters on his way to get things done that may or may not be illegal.

Knipfel gives the standard self-destruction narrative unexpected texture with normal loving parents, a genetic disease that makes him start going blind by age twenty, deft and liberal touches of black humor, a frank understanding of his own suicidal impulses (every year or eighteen months, he says, living just gets too much), and, eventually, a foldout cane that goes “flubbity-flubbity.”

It’s hilarious and compulsive and peters out into cranky optimism that feels well-earned by the end. 

Life and books and books and life

Your Constant Reader is not going to do that thing she despises in other blogs, where the writer apologizes for going silent for awhile and spends too many words describing why when “life” usually sums it up pretty well.

Life is NOT what happens when you’re making other plans. You have to catch that mofo and shape it however you can or else it’ll just ooze through your fingers like flubber.

That’s what your Constant Reader has been doing lately—trying to mold this post-graduation mush into some sort of living. And it’s working, sort of. In the past month, I’ve finished the first draft of my (latest? Third? Sounds pretentious until I remind everyone that they’re all unpublished) novel, gotten a (part-time minimum wage) job, and laid plans that might soon have me moving out of my parents’ house and back to my college town (NOT GRAD SCHOOL, you fake job site leeches! Gerroff!).

I keep reading through all this, continuously, compulsively, like breathing, but it’s all old stuff I’ve read a million times and I’m reading again because it soothes the anxiety that thrums through my brain and keeps me up at night worrying about my next steps in that pesky real world. The most coherent opinions I have about any of them by now have degraded to “SHUT UP AM REEEEEAAAAADING.”

But Monday, I drove by Boarder’s and mourned their last four days of business over here by spending $6.22 on five books and one album. All new.

I also dove into the free pile which is caged outside the (other) bookstore that’s next to the store where I work now. I’m going to need blinders or massive stress-induced migraines to keep my reading list from multiplying like bunnies.

Look to the next entry to see which one I’ve already devoured, and stay tuned for the rest mingled amongst your Constant Reader’s shouts of triumph and frustration. I imagine it’ll get rather loud around here.  

Superheroes through one good eye

Book: Marvels

Writer: Kurt Busiek

Artist: Alex Ross

Published 2008 (as collection, Marvel)

Pages: Guys, comics don’t number their pages. Let’s just get over that now.

This is more dreamy watercolors from Alex Ross, this time depicting the rise of the Marvel universe in New York City with a focus (heh) on how it affects the citizen as seen through the photojournalistic lens of Phil Sheldon.

I use the word “dreamy” because Ross’s art is blurred just enough around the edges to give me a sort of warm fuzzy feeling when I’m looking at it even when he’s showing me a massive two-page spread of carnage wrecked by the superheroes who are supposed to be protecting the damn city, not tearing it apart. *shakes cane*

That’s what most of the conflict is about—whether or not the superheroes who emerge are actually good or just another agent of chaos (albeit well-meaning). Public opinion sways with how the big battles go; Phil himself leans more toward the thankful side with an “oh hell no!” streak about mutants, which surprised me considering how obsessed he becomes about documenting all the others so they’ll be better understood.

The writing is good in this one. Phil’s internal monologues sound like things people actually think to themselves, and he’s not overly perfect by any means. This might be a result of him being a normal guy instead of, like, Spiderman or someone, but I don’t really care because it makes for good outside observation on just exactly how these heroes are received. Good call making him a photojournalist too, because that way he can be everywhere the plot needs him to be without any unnatural torturing of his own storyline.

I never did get a full answer out of him, though. He just keeps questioning his and everybody else’s views about the superheroes until he retires, and then he puts it down like he puts down his camera. Maybe the resolution lies deeper in the Marvel canon.

A few influences I noticed in the art:

• I’m definitely not imagining the Nighthawks panel, where Ross paints a couple of his main characters into that famous café for dinner.
• I’m almost positive I’m not imagining Bea Author being painted as one of the guests who talks about how ugly the Thing is during a sculpture opening.
• I might be imagining the faces of Paul McCartney, Jimmi Page, and Keith Moon being in a couple of the medium-angle crowd scenes. I do like my classic rock. 

Fangirl time!

Book: A Perfectly Good Family

Author: Lionel Shriver

Published: 1996 (Faber and Faber)

Pages: 277

I’m reviewing this book because it gives me an excuse to fangirl about Lionel Shriver. Ready? Here goes.

AHHHHH She’s such a good author she expresses all the internal intricacies of life so well she’s not afraid to explore and expose the ugly parts either she gets the interplay of duty and selfishness and wanting things both ways and the consequences of that exactly right she articulates the personal war between discipline and what’s “good” for you with the spontaneous joy and equally unexpected heartbreak that comes from living recklessly she’s even got a cool name that she chose herself because she didn’t like her own AHHHHHHHH!

Okay. So, needless to say, I like this book. It’s part of a Shriver buying spree I went on after I read We Need To Talk About Kevin and The Post-Birthday World and loved both and discovered I could buy the whole rest of her output (six or seven other books) for like $3 each on Amazon. They came one by one into my school mailbox in a delightful trickle that almost perfectly matched my reading pace.

A Perfectly Good Family is about three siblings who are warring over what to do with the giant North Carolina mansion they just inherited after their mother dies. The two brothers each want to buy the other out, and they each enlist the sister to go with them; she goes along with both because she can’t make herself choose one over the other.

The characters are fantabulous conflicted mixtures of loyalties to radically different things (parents that they didn’t especially like, the house one of them loves and the other just wants to sell, each other as siblings, an audio tech business that’s hemorrhaging money) and vices (destruction, self-discipline, being wishy-washy). It’s so, so great to read such detailed people—including the parents, who are presented as saints to the outside world but are revealed as both more and less than their children ever needed.

Even the house negotiating plot is so much more interesting than it sounds because it’s presented as the official, legal embodiment of the family’s struggle. The clashing passions with their clothes pressed and their hair combed.

The ending, though, I really, really must protest. It’s much too happy for Shriver. Everything just magically works out. She doesn’t do happy endings, usually, and I love her for that because it makes her work seem more real.

This fangirl is also worried about how the movie version of We Need To Talk About Kevin is going to bring all that internal conflict which is the vital core of the plot into a primarily visual medium. PLEASE NO VOICEOVERS OH GOD THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO DO ISN’T IT.

Sigh. But I’ll end up going to see it anyway, dammit.  

Mashed potato number one

Book: Dream Jungle

Author: Jessica Hagedorn

Published: 2003 (Penguin Books)

Pages: 325

What do I do when I’m eating vegetables on a plate with stuff that’s easier to eat, like mashed potatoes? I smush everything together so the vegetables taste a little more like mashed potatoes, so I can get full tastes of the easy stuff around trying to digest all that fiber. Ta-dah! A metaphor for my reading life: I’ve been chewing on a dense textbook for the past two weeks while swallowing gobs of a few good much faster reads.

Mashed Potato Number one is a novel woven from traditions of conquest and servitude in the Philippines, telling the story of a poor girl who goes to serve with her mother at the house of a rich man who discovered a lost Paleolithic tribe. Or at least that’s what he’s telling everybody.

It’s also about the making of a very Apocalypse Now-sounding movie about Vietnam in the same jungles five years later. The one thread both stories have in common is Lina, the young servant girl who is secretly happy when her father washes overboard and drowns on a ship journey (he made her life shit), which lets her go live with her mother in the rich man’s house. As a servant there, she gets knocked up by the master and runs away to the rough part of Manila where an actor in the movie finds her in a go-go bar and falls in love with her. He brings her onto the set of the movie as a food worker and eventually, after the giant torturous genius work is done (way over budget and time, of course, but almost worth the sanity lost), he takes her back to the States and they live semi-happily ever after.

This plot is full of parallels, mad geniuses bursting through the underbrush, deception, schmoozing, unanswered questions, disappearances, and one hell of a plot that doesn’t sacrifice the full round discontent of its characters.

And the author gets into the head of pretty much every one of her mains, switching viewpoint and headspace without warning but at least neatly divided into chapters. I see the point of jumping characters; I don’t see the point of flitting in and out of the first person seemingly at random. It’s not difficult to keep up with but it does seem unnecessary.

The ending is kind of crap, by which I mean it peters out into mysticism that I think is supposed to lend some final epic weight but really just feels like a cop out that doesn’t answer the biggest question of the narrative: did rich dude make up the tribe he found and made famous or not? I dunno, and I’ve read this thing like six times since I…bought it? Found it? I can’t remember.

It’s worth reading for the descriptions and parallels and contrasts of all the different lives that hinge on its narrative, though. For sure. 

My life between the pages

Bookmarks seem like such inconsequential, almost careless things. They’re never anything I put real thought into when I’m using them. Whenever I stop reading, I cast around for the nearest random slip of paper and use that. Sometimes that puts me in a glass case of emotion before I remember where I left off:

Movie tickets. Oh hey, that’s from the first time I drove my own car, to meet up with my best friend like it was no big deal. But it was, and I couldn’t stop grinning with my secret glee the whole time.

Paper wristbands. The blinding neon pink is from when I drank an Irish car bomb while talking about RPGs and waiting through three or four inconsequential local bands to hear who we really came to see. The one printed with ghosts is from a January 2009 dance party, the one where I learned that I actually like to dance. They’re both from the same bar, although at least three years apart.

Fortune cookie slips. My favorite says, “Forbidden fruit makes the sweetest jam.”

Receipts. This one’s from early 2010, in my university’s bookstore. I have no idea what the first book was; the name has been rubbed off. But the second, New York Stories, I still have on my shelf and read through occasionally because I don’t have a subscription to New York magazine and like pretending I do.

Scraps from English classes. I’ve marked two passages in my copy of The Sun Also Rises, one about a bullfight (imagine that) and one as my favorite Hemingway line (“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing”). In Ben Greer’s Slammer, I’ve shoved an essay assignment slip that asks, “Is there symbolism in Ben Greer’s Slammer? If so, what is it?” Oh, freshman English.

Cards from my university’s card catalogue. In their library revamp, the main branch on my campus set out a great big Dewy Decimal System bureau full of old cards that had been computerized. They were free. They were the perfect size. They had book things typed on one side. I used huge clumps of these for to-do lists, notes to myself, and bookmarks, overlapping the uses when I finished the lists and acted on the notes. One of them reminded me to look up the song "Start Wearing Purple" after my college radio station got it stuck in my head. (You’re welcome.)

So what do you use for bookmarks? Does anyone use those official, overpriced but so pretty plastic ones I used to buy at school book fairs? Has anyone ever lost important stuff from using paper like I do (I never did get that water bill back...)?  

Why I'll never go to med school

Book: Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

Author: Vincent Lam

Published: 2007 (Weinstein Books)

Pages: 337 (not counting glossary)

Don’t choke my brain with complicated procedures I have to look up when the whole point is that shit has to get done quickly to save some dude’s life. I WILL skim and I WILL not get a word of your drama.

Whew. Okay. Off my chest, so to speak.

Except for the one or two stories mentioned above, Dr. Lam writes perfectly serviceable literary fiction about his other job as an emergency physician. Reading about the medical profession always scares me while sympathizing with it at the same time because it reminds me how sleep-deprived they all are, from their decision to go to med school onward.

But these stories put human, if somewhat bland, faces on stuff like trying to keep up a relationship with another med school hopeful (that was the first story and my favorite), getting quarantined in the SARS epidemic, and dealing with psychotic patients and the night shift. And dealing with psychotic patients on the night shift. Nothing unexpected, no little inside details that really stuck out as epitomes of anything, but easily written.

Dr. Lam’s real life sounds a lot more exciting, what with the emergency physician thing and being medically trained in Canada and being the youngest writer to win the Giller Prize for fiction (2006) and coming from an expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. I’d read the shit out of that biography.

The book flap does say that his first novel, a “multigenerational family saga set in Saigon during the Vietnam War” is “forthcoming.” Great! Is four years too soon to start bugging him about that?

Also also also, a word of advice about ensemble medical fiction: DO NOT READ ERIC SEGAL’S DOCTORS. Not if you have my impatience for Bad Things Happen to Saintly People, total black/white value systems, and terrible, terrible dialogue. It’s like a soap opera on a bad week for over 400 pages. …And I totally read it like three times over four or five years but that was only because I could never convince myself that it could be as bad as I remembered. But it was. Always.