Steal Hearts, Steel Bonds/ This is Pittsburgh

Impossible Princess

(2009, Kevin Killian)

Have I written before about the danger of short story collections?  One shitty grape spoiling the bunch and all that.  It’s hard to apply that here—several of the stories actively defy being taken series—they’re little more than thought experiments or porn scenarios.

Is a funny story about rape really funny?  What if the rapist is a lonely popstar, and his victim a narcissistic closet case attending a swimming-pool sales convention in England?  What if Kylie Minogue has a walk-on roll in the star, eating pizza late into the night?

I did love the Flannery O’Conner pastiche—He would have been a good man if there’d been someone to fuck him in the ass with a gun and shoot every day of his life.”  That’s how you write a story about motherfucking AIDS.

And the bit about Hank Williams (if a little out of place), The bit after Marguerite Duras.  I haven’t read anything better about 9/11, the way America is always making and selling heroes.

Albeit a book I very much enjoyed, why end on such a fucking downer?  I guess I just don’t understand the mechanics of a healthy master/slave relationship.

After the Apocalypse

     by Maureen F. McHugh (2011)

“The music was disco.  The beat was thumping.  I went out and I started dancing, too.  My head was still kind of light and as I was dancing, I felt lighter and lighter.  Not in a bad way, but in a good way.  I thought about those girls in the bathroom.  And what it would be like to be able to decide to go to Hawaii.  About what it would be like ot be them, or to have gotten the other kind of injection”

—from “Honeymoon”

[…]

“‘The didn’t know anything about the woods, just two guys up from Biloxi or something, kind of guys who, you know, manage a copy store or a fast-food joint or something, thinking that now that civilization is falling apart they can be like the hero in one of their video games.’”

—from “After the Apocalypse”

Often, the most interesting thing about a post-apocalyptic work (or really any half-assed speculative work) is the world itself—the overgrown weeds, broken glass, and the precious caches of looted canned goods.  The characters are mere avatars.  Look at Cormac McCarthy—the man, his son aren’t real people.  They’re the eyes we use to look down the road at the horrors that await.  We turn pages with the same detachment that links the trigger of a gun to the R1 button on a PS3 controller.  But McHugh’s characters are all living (or dying), breathing people with names and histories, selfish, horny, hungry, stupid.  This shit is all deeply satisfying.

“After I moved to Los Angeles, I realized that I had written a book about bad things happening and I didn’t have an earthquake kit. This could be embarrassing—Writer of Apocalyptic Fiction Unprepared For Earthquake. This is exactly the kind of thing I am trying to figure out in my writing. What can I be prepared for and what is basically out of my control and how awful is what is out of my control going to be?”

—Maureen F. McHugh And The Earthquake Kit

Dirty One: Stories

    by Michael Graves (2011)

“God? Thank God you made me this way.  Because girls are sort of… gross. I know they’re nice, but… to me they’re nasty.  That’s why I like Ben.  I’d rather play with him than some girl.  I want us to be best friends.  Best buds.  Twins.  The same.  Make me just like Ben.  Please.  PLease.  Please.  Guess I gotta go.  Oh…and forgive us for not going to church.  We would, but Mom’s too nervous.”

[…]

I pealed away my brown slacks.  Tugging at the thick waistband of my underwear, I dropped them.  Faint curly-q’s circled my penis.  They shot up and darkened my vanilla skin.  Like Ben, I wanted to be smooth and soft.  No hair.  Then, beneath our Hanes, we’d be closer, closer to being the same.

The same.

The same.

Pressing mom’s pink blade down, I pulled.  First to one side, then to the other.  Strands of hair sprinkled the floor.

I continued shaving, shaving through the dry, dry pain.  I shaved until they were gone.  I shaved until nothing was left but my new, magenta skin.

The same.

In Persuasion Nation

  by George Saunders (2006)

Generally, I leave a quote I enjoyed, but I read this like two weeks ago, returned it this afternoon, so that’s not gonna happen.  A haphazard review will have to suffice.

A range running from awful to brilliant; as I’m reading more short fiction, single-author collections, these days—this always comes up.  There’s usually a shitty story or two or three and this, short of being a “Collect Works,” you think everybody would have been better off if a particular story had not been included. 

What the fuck was that thing about the monkeys? I remember reading Strange Horizon’s list of Stories We See Too Much: Stories with titles that are a long string of numbers.  And I’ll be happy if I never read another too-long story about an anthropomorphized candy wrapper.  And doesn’t Saunders realize?  Even oranges have T.V. commercials now.

But “Jon”?  Simply lovely, though I couldn’t help but think that Taste Makers would be wearing something nicer than Old Navy boxer shorts.  Banana Republic, at least.

Also, first person annoys the shit out of me.  I’m gonna make this point again when I finish the collection I’m reading now.  EVERYBODY SOUNDS THE SAME.  “Minimalist” is a style of writing, of speaking, but it’s rarely a personality type.

Twenty-Six

by Jonathan Kemp (2011)

Commenting on the action later to a friend, one of them will say, ‘I took two cocks up my arse at once; it felt fucking great,’ thereby proving the inadequacy of words, demonstrating how they wring dry the intensity of every moment and hang it up for inspection, hang it out to dry, colourless and mistaken. 

Money Boy by Paul Yee

I jam my buds into my ears but don’t connect them.  I need to save the battery.  Walking around without wires looks pitiful, and even sadder if you’re alone. 

You look like you don’t know music.  You look poor.

Ray Liu immigrated to Toronto at age 14.  Now 18, he’s still two-and-a-half years from graduation, having been held back in ESL classes, but English still doesn’t come easy to him, unlike his stepbrother, unlike his Chinese friends who all had English tutors back in China.  Consequently, his grades suck and his ex-military father is perpetually pissed off.  Ba wants Ray to be a doctor.  Ray just wants to be somewhere else.

He’s embraced Western Society so far as he enjoys conspicuous consumption: an iPod, a laptop, the widest widescreen TV of all his friends,  menagerie of brightly colored high-tops.  He can’t be blamed for this apparent vapidity, though.  These are the fetishes of Western Culture his father lives for.  Is Ray to blame for his failure to assimilate, or his father?  To answer that, must we first decide whether assimilation is something admirable?

It suffices to say that Ray is not Canadian, does not want to be Canadian.  He longs for his flawed mother, a gambling addict, possibly a prostitute, who stayed behind.   He immerses himself in the geography of his homeland while playing a Chinese MMO.  There, he is Steel, a man who fights for Honor points, not for Blood. 

He worries when the Rebel Command he fights for decides to give up on a direct offensive and engage in guerilla tactics.  This will mean a long war, a costly one, and many peasants will die.  The people want a quick war, one with an end, he tells his clan on their Chinese-language forum, the only place he can express himself elegantly, honestly.  He scolds them, but they don’t buy his logic:



Coward, I retort.  You’re afraid to fight and die.

No, Steel, you’re the coward.  You fear failure.  You would rather die quickly than work slowly to reduce the enemy’s power.  Besides, what do you know about ordinary people?  You were born into wealth.



This an avatar confronting an avatar, But the words burn through the screen:

Too many things to be Chinese.  Not enough language to be Canadian.

All of that is enough to explain Ray’s feelings of isolation, but he’s in the closet, too.  When his father finds gay websites listed in Ray’s internet history, they’re not porn sites, they’re support sites: When to come out to your parents, What to say.  Ba freaks, throws Ray’s closes on the lawn.  Ray runs. 

To downtown, to the gayborhood, to Boy Street, where the rentboys pose.  Maybe that will be me, he wonders, but almost in jest.  He’s still got money in his pocket.  He spends a night on a loading dock and gets robbed.  Then a night in a shelter.  Penniless, he reaches out to his stepbrother who gives him a loan.  Then two nights in a hostel, and his laptop is stolen.  No more gaming.  Things are getting dire.  Back to the shelter, where, tonight, his stepbrother and his fundamentalist girlfriend are serving dinner.  Too proud, he runs.  Back to Boy Street.  A Chinese man in a nice car rolls up, addresses him in Mandarin.  This will make things easier, he thinks, selling himself to someone he can speak to.  Never-mind the fact that he’s never touched another dick.  This man drives a Lexus.

I want gay sex.

It will prove things.

The man is tender, respectful, knows it’s his first time.  Buys him a meal.  Holds him.  The sex is oblique.  Ray spends the night.  (Every first time is a dream or a nightmare.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like if the first time I was fucked was the first time I was paid.)

Things are not what they seem, though.  This man is a pimp.  After Ray’s first date with a Western client, he vomits.  Now comes a tidy ending.  Ba offers a netbook as a peace offering, and with a little compromise and little fanfare, Ray comes home and comes out.

I loved this book.  I wish I had it when I was a teenager.  I came out around the same time Rainbow Boys was published and given a Lambda Literary Award.  I was terrified to buy it, but I did and devoured it.  It’s an awful trite sermonizing piece of shit that reeks of whiteness and privilege.  While any kind of representation is better than none, finding a boyfriend is far from the primary concern of most queer youth.  Few gay teens know a single other gay teen, and if they know one, odds are they’re not compatible.  (Back in high school, was I supposed to fucking Alex?  Of course not.  We were both off fucking college boys, separately. 

While reading reviews of Money Boy online, I came across an offensively negative and inadequate review on the Lambda Literary site.  Their reviewer seems to disagree with the any representation is good representation idea.  He finds Ray naive, vapid, essentially unlikable.  Ray is naive and somewhat vapid.  But unlikable?  Most teens are naive and vapid.  At least real ones; rainbow boys aren’t.  Rainbow boys are self-loathing and adorable until the climax at which point they become giddily proud and adorable. 

And again: Whiteness and privilege at work.   The reviewer seems completely ignorant to the culture-based shame which pervades Ray’s sense of self, despite the fact that the words “shame” and “pride” are used a number of times in the text:  Ba tells Ray he shames his family, Ray worries he’s shamed his family when a neighbor witnesses him picking his clothes of the lawn, Ray’s too proud to go to a shelter, he finds feminine homosexuals shameful, and the list goes on and on.  Pride is discussed at length, but never in the reductive  sense of “Gay Pride”.  When you’re not a rich, white, popular, suburban teenager, other sorts of pride are more exigent to well being than the sort that leads one to wave a flag in a parade. 

There’s rainbow boys, and there’s the rest of us.  This is a book for the rest of us.

As an addendum, this is not a novel about a teenage sex worker.  This is a a novel about a boy who engages in two singular acts of survival sex.  The Lambda reviewer seemed to be unable to make this distinction, too.

Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 by Anthony Burgess

I’ve about 2000 words in notes about why I hate this book so much, but in the interest of brevity and clarity I’m gonna burn them down to four points.

After describing a man as “probably the best of the Caribbean novelists,” and before describing an Achebe novel as “probably the best book to come out of West Africa,”  he declares, “I do not like the division of the novel in English into national entities.”

Again, from the voice of a white man: “This book sums up much of what modern India is about.”  Similiary, Dorris Lessing can tell you more about what it’s like to be a woman than anyone else.  How an Englishman knows what it’s like to be in modern India or have a vagina I’m rather perplexed about.

Lolita “is a vastly inferior book” compared to Nabokov’s early Russian novels; “Lolita was a bestseller because of its theme…which lubricious readers gloated over while missing the beauty and intricacy of the writing.”  That may be the reason people bought the book, but if that were the only reason, they certainly didn’t finish it.  Who the fuck is Burgess writing too if the not the masses who were seduced by the promise of ultraviolence?

At least two dozen of these ninety-nine are described as having “a bit of Kafka,” or some variation on that phrase.  Burgess finds anything slightly out of the ordinary, completely bizarre, science fictional, or possibly but not necessary symbolic to be inspired by the divine spectre of Kafka.  Let the poor dead man rest. 

But what’s most disturbing, and this happens in more than fifty percent of the entries, is the way Burgess in the last few sentences completely undoes his praise, makes a laundry list of failures on the part of the author.  These may be the ninety-nine best novels in English since 1939, but if we’re to take Burgess at his word, not much very good has been written since then.  Unless Aldous Huxley was at his pen.

vintageanchor:

“ I was telling stories before I could write. I like to tell stories, and I like to talk to things. If you]ve read fairy tales, you know that everything can talk,from trees to chairs to tables to brooms. So I grew up thinking that, and I turned it into stories. ”
— J. California Cooper

I’ve never read this woman, but I ought to read this woman because I always see her name when I’m bored and horny at the library and looking for Dennis Cooper’s books.

***Which makes me think, I ought write about why now I only read Dennis Cooper when I’m bored and horny (or more likely, bored and stoned or drunk and horny) and how he was my god of fiction at fifteen.

So precious, so ridiculous, one can’t help but fall under its spell.