The Book-a-Week Project, Week 16

The R. Crumb Handbook
R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski

I’m not a huge fan of R. Crumb’s work, but I am a fan of R. Crumb’s personality. I like his neuroses and his fascination with ragtime music and large women. I like his illustrative style, but I never get giddy when I read his comics. I’d much rather watch Crumb, the documentary. The Handbook is good that way. It contains samples of his work collected in thematic chapters and interspersed with writing from Big R. himself.

The definite highlight is the inclusion of a CD with ragtime covers from bands Crumb has been in over the past thirty years. It’s all really good. “My Baby’s Pussy” stands out.

The Book-a-Week Project, Week 15

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
George Saunders

George Saunders is so brilliant you should be intimidated. But you must not be intimidated. His writing is consistently warm -- critical but not cynical. Reign of Phil is a short novella (although the longest thing I’ve read by Saunders) about war. It is funny and odd. The accompanying illustrations are terrible. They look like the graphics on hipster t-shirts.

Saunders received the MacArthur Fellowship grant last year (as did John Zorn). Let’s hope he uses the time it buys him to write a massive novel, or at least several hundred more short stories.

Are you ready? Okay, take your hand in mine as I take mine in yours. Now hope, little one. Hope with all your might, god damn you!

A Thick Slice of Portland

My next door neighbor is a white, mousy lesbian with Buddhist prayer flags hanging all round her front porch. She doesn’t drive a car, but her girlfriend does: a Prius. If one of them had dreadlocks, everything would be perfect.

The Book-a-Week Project, Week 14

Monster Nation: A Zombie Novel
David Wellington

Wellington’s first novel in this series, Monster Island, describes a world overrun by zombie hordes and the desperate attempts by the few remaining living to resist them.

Monster Nation is the prequel, focusing on the cause and initial spread of the zombie epidemic. As in Monster Island, it follows a couple characters integral to the struggle, one alive and one undead. Due to the circumstances of her infection, the undead character is, as with Island, capable of logic and speech, unlike typical zombies.

The zombies in Monster Island have psychic connections with each other. In Nation, they also have the ability to see the life force of the living (appearing as something like molten gold). Wellington’s zombie mythos is heavily influenced by non-specific forms of magic and mysticism.

An oddity in his zombie world that makes no sense to me is the existence of non-human zombies. One of the main characters kills a bear who reanimates moments later. Another character is turned into a zombie after zombie sheep eat his arms while he’s unconscious. I'm not aware of any zombie animals in George Romero’s films, and Max Brooks’ hypothetical Solanum virus dies within hours of killing any non-human host, making it impossible for reanimation to occur. Also, zombie animals are inconsistent with the tendency of zombies to serve as metaphors for the worst aspects of humanity. It makes some sense for zombies to kill animals, but not for those animals to then join the horde.

Small gripes, however. Ultimately, Monster Nation is a fun, well-told story that adds to the genre. Though his attempts at colloquial speech are occasionally clumsy and sterotypical (that of the white suburban thug is particularly bad), Wellington writes believable characters. I can’t wait for Monster Planet.

I also can’t wait for The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders.

One Foot, Two Foot, Red Foot, Dumbshit

The Boston Marathon was yesterday. You don’t care, but that’s okay. Neither, apparently, does most of the rest of the United States, which is why only two marathons are annually broadcast live -- Boston and New York. Tens of thousands of hours of sports broadcasting is devoted to steroid-jacked idiots slamming into each other. Six is devoted to marathons.

And even with that little time, the marathon itself is apparently not interesting enough, because the last two Boston Marathons (at least) have shared airtime with the Iraq Boston Marathon. Huh? Yeah! It's the Boston Marathon, except that it happens to be run by American soldiers in Iraq. Which -- hey, wait a minute! -- makes it not the Boston Marathon at all! It kinda sorta makes it the Iraq Marathon!

Here is why: Doing one thing at the same time as another thing does not make you part of that other thing. See, when I’m on the couch beating off to porn, I'm not actually having sex with a Latvian tranny named Seductra.

Were it not for that confusion, though, it wouldn't allow the producers of the marathon broadcast to insert good-natured well-wishes from various Hollywood actors who they cornered on some red carpet. Even the effervescent Tara Reid found time to thank the soldiers for defending America and wish them good luck in their space-and-time-traversing marathon. Then her titty popped out.

Another Boston Marathon run somewhere completely fucking unrelated to Boston was completed by an astronaut, who did it on a treadmill with her official bib taped to the front. God Bless Us.

The reason you will never see more marathons on TV is that they are usually won by non-Americans. And non-American is just another word for un-American.

The Book-a-Week Project, Week 13

Jenny and the Jaws of Life: Short Stories
Jincy Willett

I've always had a feeling that subtlety and wit were fated to be eternally just out of my grasp, and this book proves it. I read only half the stories, and here's what they were about: a marriage that slowly and painfully dissolves after an argument about the existence of ghosts makes the couple realize they don’t actually know anything about each other; a woman’s rape and the cold distancing of herself from everyone around her afterwards; a man trying to deal with the murder of his sister (with a shotgun to the back of the head) by the couple's children; a man cheating on his wife who has a breast tumor; a woman who deliberately attempts to hurt her father by withholding any demonstration of affection.

These are the story premises of a book that David Sedaris (its cover blares) called “just the funniest collection of stories I’ve ever read”. Kirkus Reviews called it “first-rate comic writing”. Those accolades, in addition to numerous mentions of her wit, force me accept that I must not get something about the stories. To me, they seem morbid and depressing. Willett’s language is precise and complex, for sure, but it seemed to be used to tell stories that are about nothing more than the character’s emotional distance from everyone they know and ultimately themselves. I expected to laugh or smile somewhere and kept searching for the story that held that trigger. I found “Résumé”, which is a short proposal to God for eternal life in exchange for nothing. Funny for its four and a half pages, but not worth the slog through so much sadness.

If I had a blurb on the book, it would say, “Miserable, depressing, and very smart.”

Thankfully, David Wellington’s Monster Nation awaits me at the library. It’s the sequel to Monster Island. Wellington is nowhere near as skilled a writer as Jincy Willett, but his subject matter is much closer to my heart: MOTHERFUCKING ZOMBIES.