Buzzed Books #54: Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

22 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, politics

Buzzed Books #54 by John King

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Al Franken has given me great solace over the years. I still buy and drink Ovaltine because the company sponsored his radio show from 2003-2007.

For creative people, one intriguing lesson to be drawn from Al Franken’s career is that he was a successful entertainer and writer working for SNL for fifteen years, but didn’t find his deeper calling until the mid-1990s, when he creatively changed his focus to politics. Basic professional success is not necessarily about doing one’s greatest work.

In 1996, he published Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.

I come from an academic world whose chief article of faith is in the power of critical thinking, and Al Franken delivered critical thinking with a powerful clarity that made the possibility of functional governance seem plausible even to my cynical eyes.

His follow up analytic work, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2003), was equally brilliant.

Franken chronicled our governmental shortcomings in the War in Iraq, including strategic errors, profiteering, and corruption. Franken trusts his readers to not be bored by looking at the facts and trying to make sense of the statistics, and what the experts have to say about them. Or he trusts himself to tell enough jokes to keep us entertained while delivering such political analysis.

In 2003, Al Franken started a radio show that put such funny, analytic effort to work five days a week. For those too young to remember, the administration of George W. Bush attempted to gaslight the populace by continuously suggesting that incompetence was better than competence, that cause bore no relationship to effect, and that those who disagreed were part of the inferior “reality based community.” I am not making that up. The show was originally called The O’Franken Factor (in order to troll Bill O’Reilly), but later assumed the more coherent nomenclature of The Al Franken Show. The goal of the program was to provide a progressive alternative to the hate-ins offered by conservative talk radio, and to defeat the re-election of President Bush. The Al Franken Show at least succeeded in the former.

From 2003 to 2007, Al Franken and his team preached to their liberal choir, something that liberals had avoided before then as if the choir should always be ignored, as if reaching out to liars to try to persuade them of your position was the only mission of public discourse. Al Franken didn’t just preach to the choir since he did often reach out to those who disagreed with him, but what his preaching to the choir did was to reveal how much different his choir was from conservative ones. There was an emphasis on analysis and understatement. One of his habits was to begin the show by reading a piece of hate mail calmly, interjecting with some commentary on the style of the letter, and then to not rebut the claims of the letter, but to move on to deeper discussion.

In 2007, Franken campaigned to become the junior senator from Minnesota, and (after a prolonged, contested recall) won the race. While I was glad for him, since I knew from listening to his shows and reading his books that he had a shrewd and deliberative mind and could likely serve well in Congress. On the other hand, I earnestly wondered if his influence on public policy and the larger national conversations about American governance and policy would have been more influential as a liberal pundit.

Over the last decade, I have not had much information with which to try to answer that question. With the publication of the memoir, Al Franken: Giant of the Senate, though, I now feel like I do.

One peculiarity of Al Franken’s latest book is that it must serve paradoxical purposes:

Tell the optimistic redemptive narrative one expects from the genre of political memoir.
Avoid the cloying, glib optimism one expects from political memoir.
Offer comparable analytic insight to what gained him a readership with Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and The Truth (With Jokes).
Be entertaining.
Be funny.

Giant of the Senate accomplishes all of the above. Franken had to somehow stay true to his Senatorial persona and his comic pundit persona. One of the great surprises of this memoir is how much insight Franken provides into how the Senate works (and doesn’t work). For example, in his conversational, yet precise style, he discusses the way that Republicans hamstrung the Affordable Care Act:

we’d anticipated … that the people signing up for insurance might be sicker than expected. So we built into the law several programs to mitigate the risks that insurers faced when they entered this new market, helping to make up for initial losses and keep them in the insurance market. One important program was called “risk corridors,” another example of Democratic messaging genius. But Republicans, led by the wilier-than-you-might-have-expected Marco Rubio, snuck a rider into a spending bill that killed off risk corridors, which meant insurance companies wound up only getting compensated for about 12 percent of what they were owed. Thus a bunch of insurers waltzed, premiums shot up, and Rubio and his friends rubbed their hands together while cackling gleefully.

The early chapters of Giant of the Senate cover his childhood through his SNL years and are meant to make this book align more comfortably with political memoirs—his origin story with some redemptive arc. One of the great things about this memoir, including these chapters, is how often Franken invites us to be critical of his indiscretions as a child, and manages to let enough real humanity enter these narratives before they become saccharine. Another thing that comes across is his real affinity and pride for his state of Minnesota.

Giant of the Senate hasn’t made me much more optimistic about the state of the US government, but it has given me solace, in letting me see the conscientious work of an intelligent person who is letting me see more clearly how the government is working. There is some comfort in that clarity.

Plus Al Franken is still damned funny.

1flip John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Buzzed Books # 53: Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

11 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Memoir

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Buzzed Books # 53 by Amy Watkins

Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

Near the end of my MFA, a new writer friend asked the topic of my critical thesis. I launched into a long and not particularly coherent description of the 20 or so ideas–all inextricably related in my mind–that had almost coalesced into a workable subject after four months and 30-odd pages of writing. The other writer laughed and said, “You must be a poet.” All good art is about more than one thing, but we poets seem especially inclined to the mental leaps that link ideas, cross disciplines, and complicate our elevator pitches.

Camille T. Dungy is best known as a poet and editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. We often say that poets bring a poetic eye or ear to their prose, but I would argue that Dungy brings a poetic mind to her collection of essays. Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton, 2017) includes some beautiful, lyrical moments, but it is most poetic in the way it interweaves experience, history, family stories, scientific research, and naturalist lore.

Guidebook to Relative Strangers

On the surface, the book is about Dungy traveling to speaking engagements around the country with her baby daughter, but that subject quickly becomes more complicated as Dungy brings her full poetic intellect to bear on each situation. A conversation about movies, a hike through unfamiliar terrain, a layover at a small airport with a restless baby, a walk through her own neighborhood prove equally promising starting points for reflections on race, American history, conservation, and academic life, as well as more personal concerns. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that Dungy’s essays remind us that all these subjects are simultaneously scholarly and personal.

In “Bounds,” a multi-part essay near the middle of the book, Dungy tells a story about her daughter learning to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” With scientific attention to detail, Dungy observes how the toddler develops her new skill in stages–humming the tune then singing nonsense words then losing the tune temporarily as she acquires each word of the lyrics then, finally, combining language and melody. An essay that meticulously charts the development of the writer’s child could easily become sentimental, boring, or both, but Dungy brings all her intellect, knowledge, and curiosity to the subject. She weaves in research on neurological development and linguistics, memories of her own childhood, and lyrical musings on the nature and purpose of language to create an essay at once intimate and intellectual.

Besides enhancing individual essays, this richness of ideas in a book about and by a new mother directly contradicts the obnoxious notion that parents–mothers in particular–become so narrowly focused on their children that they lose their intellectual curiosity or drive. As Dungy puts it in “Bounds”:

When I seem to be focused on a narrative about my daughter’s childhood, I might shift to a memory of an event that happened years before I was born because we live through multiple domains of relation at once….once a domain of relation is available, there is no guarantee that it will ever fully cease to influence us.

This complexity is what makes Guidebook so engaging. It’s also a main point of the collection. The domains of race, history, and nature are available to Dungy, even as she explores the new “domain” of motherhood. Hers is a poetic intelligence at work at masterful prose.

amy-watkins

Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.

Buzzed Books #52: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

18 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Poetry

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Buzzed Books #52 by Amy Watkins

Anna Journey’s The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

Much art is made to elevate mundane things. Think of Georgia O’Keefe demanding that we look again at humble flowers. Think of Neruda gazing at a slice of lemon and seeing a cathedral window, or finding the poetry in a suit or a pair of socks. An artist like Neruda or O’Keefe makes the mundane sacred. Anna Journey’s new collection, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (LSU Press, 2017), is full of poems about vulgar, even ridiculous things, but what is extraordinary about them is not that they are holy, but that they express what is so naturally strange about the human condition.

The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Dildophone,” about a joke musical instrument “played” onstage by a prank-loving musician ex-boyfriend. The dildophone (a sex toy taped to a funnel) may not be an everyday object, but if we use the second definition of “common”–“showing a lack of taste and refinement”–it’s about as common as it gets:

[…] between

the banjo and mandolin players, red-

bearded and wiggling and he swung

the dildophone’s cock. For a solo

he’d jack off the shaft as if to alter

the instrument’s pitch.

Journey doesn’t pretend that the dildophone is anything more profound than a vulgar sight gag, but she uses its vulgarity as a starting place for a meditation on abuse, autonomy, and art:

They didn’t know

how his mother slapped him when,

at fifteen, he traded his violin

for an electric bass, or the way she’d pop

another codeine and make him–three

years old–balance a pencil against

the spruce body of a toy fiddle

for an hour each day so he could practice

holding a bow […]. Sometimes

if she looked away, he’d start to hum

and feel the body resonate.

The dildophone is elevated by what it represents to the poet: personal and artistic freedom. She doesn’t claim that the dildophone is sacred, but she forcefully shows us that a thing can be both vulgar and significant.

The book is full of poems like this: poems about vulgar, absurd objects and experiences imbued with personal significance. For instance, two separate poems about a prom corsage made of fried chicken drumsticks–a novelty spotted online–use the bizarre object as occasion to ponder maturity, aging, and death. In the first of these, “Fried Chicken Prom Corsage: Ode to My Thirties,” she likens the object to the “brutal extravagance” she possessed as a younger woman. She writes, “I should throw / myself a party for having / even survived.” In a poem about the ordinary experience of receiving maternal advice, she uses the ridiculous image of hanging a slice of bread out of her mouth while chopping onions to begin a litany of loss:

[…] the white oak swamp’s

wafts of methane, the idling pickups, the fuck yous

I spat and left hanging in the air. The man

I left there. Or the flare of my dead

closeted grandfather–brandy cobbling

the bottom of his breath as he crawled out

of his ground-floor window for weeks

to wander the neighborhood after his lover’s

suicide, drunk, muttering, still wearing

Bob’s tweed hat.

Each poem launches from its triggering image into something bigger, more significant, yet it remains firmly grounded by that image.

On the whole, the poems are original, personal, and funny. Because they are so specific and because they often include something truly weird, they also feel absolutely honest in a you-can’t-make-this-shit-up kind of way. The world Journey writes is strange, but recognizable.

Pair with: the dildophoner’s favorite beverage, a common rum and Coke.

_______

amy-watkins

Buzzed Books #51: Being Elvis

21 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Buzzed Books #51 by Scott Hoffman

Ray Connolly’s Being Elvis: A Lonely Life

When I was asked to review Ray Connolly’s new Elvis biography, Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, my first thought was, do we need another Elvis biography? His life is already a part of our national myth. His meteoric rise in the 1950s from poverty in rural Mississippi to rock stardom represents for many the epitome of the American Dream, unheard of success in a land where anyone can become successful. His fall in the succeeding decades, becoming an overweight, drug-addled recluse, reminds others that there’s a price for that dream, a Faustian deal where happiness and integrity are traded away for wealth and fame. Writers have covered Elvis’ life from nearly every possible angle. Bookstores (or if you prefer, Amazon) are packed with personal memoirs written by nearly everyone who knew him—his ex-wife, cousins, girlfriends, various hangers-on, and even his maid—each vying to correct the record. Multiple biographies are available, too, ranging from Albert Goldman’s Elvis, a vulgar exercise in character assassination, to Peter Guralnick’s scholarly two-volume Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. Published some twenty years ago, Guralnick’s book is well-researched, digging deep into the archives at Graceland, and thorough, offering an in-depth portrait of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, his influences, his motivations, his rise, his fall. Many consider it literally the last word in Elvis biographies. It’s still startling, though, to see it in Memphis’ touristy souvenir shops next to the bobbleheads and snow globes. Yet, new books about Elvis appear each year.

Ray Connolly is novelist and a journalist who interviewed many of the cultural icons of the sixties and seventies, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Elvis himself. He enters into the constant conversation about Elvis with a psychological biography of sorts that explores, as the title implies, what it meant to be Elvis. A portrait emerges of man scarred by poverty in his youth and driven by an irrational fear that one day he could return to it. That fear, coupled with his love of music, fueled the relentless the artistic and monetary success of his early career, but it eventually led him to abandon his love of music to simply make money, and to such unwise decisions as his amphetamine habit to keep up the relentless pace of touring, his choice of the unscrupulous Colonel Tom Parker as his manager, and a string of lackluster films and concerts.

As a biography, Being Elvis adds little to what we know about Elvis, and his theme, being Elvis, often vanishes from sight only to reappear stuffed into the book’s final pages as Connolly wraps up his account. If I were to review Being Elvis solely by what new facts and insights Connolly brings, I couldn’t recommend it. We’ve seen much of this material before…and so has he.

As a story, though, Being Elvis is an exemplary use of novelistic techniques to draw a dramatic narrative from this well-known twentieth century musical phenomenon, Elvis’s rise and fall. So many memoirs and biographies simply string together the events of that life, linked only by passages that, depending on the writer’s perspective, argue that Elvis was a genius or a fool, a victim or a monster. Goldman fell easily into this trap. Guralnick didn’t, and neither does Connolly. This is a gripping Faustian tale for sure, and Connolly’s clear that the Devil is Colonel Parker, a man who knew little about music and came to use his superstar client as a cash cow to finance his own prodigious gambling debts. Connolly convincingly captures Elvis’ struggle between the desire to be a great artist and Parker’s incessant, cruel demands for more money. The reader feels the young Elvis’ wild joy in his music and his success. Later, that joy slips away as money replaces music, bringing an older but no more wiser Elvis only disappointment and desperation. For those who see Elvis as larger than life, Connolly’s deep empathy for a man scarred by poverty comes as a revelation. And it should. The writer who wants to tell history or write biography compellingly can look to Being Elvis and learn.

_______

Scott Hoffman

Scott Hoffman (Episode 66, 241) is an independent scholar and native Austinite living and working in his hometown. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University in 2005 and is currently revising his manuscript Haloed by the Nation: Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America. In 2008, he was nominated for a Lone Star Emmy for researching and writing The World, the War and Texas, a public television documentary about Texans during the Second World War. His publications include “How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria? St. Maria Goretti in the Post-Counter-Cultural World” in The CRITIC and “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “‘Last Night I Prayed to Matthew:’ Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America,” both in Religion and American Culture. This year he completed compiling an LBGT Resource Guide for the Austin History Center. In his spare time Scott likes to sing like nobody’s listenin’ and dance like nobody’s watchin’, which means he tends to wail and flail his arms a lot…

Buzzed Books #50: Ari Banias’ Anybody

14 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Poetry

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Buzzed Books #50 by Amy Watkins

Ari Banias’ Anybody

Ari Banias’ debut collection, Anybody (Norton, 2016), begins with a poem titled “Some Kind of We.” In it, his reason for writing is laid out as plainly as a thesis statement in a freshman composition class:

I am trying to write, generally and specifically,

through what I see and what I know,

about my life (about our lives?),

if in all this there can still be–tarnished,

problematic, and certainly uneven–a we.

Throughout the book, that “we” changes shape, from the American everyperson to pairs of lovers to family to gender groups.

What holds each “we” together is tenuous. For instance, he imagines that every home in America holds “the large plastic bag / with slightly smaller mashed-together / plastic bags inside.” As a basis for a poetic national identity, it’s not much, but it’s also probably true. There’s a gallon-sized ziplock stuffed with plastic grocery bags in one of my kitchen drawers as we speak. I use them to line the bathroom trashcan. Banias’ poem continues: “it is overflowing, and we keeping adding, / bringing home more than we need.” We are excessive, but we knew that already, didn’t we?

In poems about more specific or more personal groups, the imagery carries more emotional weight. In “Villagers,” immigrants to the US are recognizable by “boxes taped up and up then tied with twine | addressed on every side | in that careful longhand taught on other continents.” Because one of the book’s “wes” is the speaker himself–a person who has inhabited multiple genders, carried multiple names–images of clothing are especially significant: a nightgown that becomes a jellyfish, a tuxedo, “a sundress on a splintery / swingset in Texas.” In one of the collection’s most poignant moments, his grandmother, oblivious to his bound breasts and changing identity, places her engagement ring on his finger and calls him beautiful.

Many of the poems rely on a Frank O’Hara-esque stream of consciousness–images and ideas racing ahead of the poet’s or the reader’s ability to logically categorize them. Poetry is made out of this kind of risky juxtaposition, but great metaphors are recognizable as well as unexpected:

Some taught me famous names, to drop the coins of these

in slots of conversation so with others I might feel like we.

This is new, but it’s also such an apt description of the awkward pop culture currency teenagers (and some adults) trade in that it feels almost familiar, as if we should always have thought of it this way. The same poem continues:

But I at the shore of a sea, I on the pebbled, tar-smeared edge

of an island. There hungered or grumbled or stood an astonished I

I picked at like a splinter once part of something bigger.

That desire to be part of something bigger–to “feel like we” as well as “I”–is something that genuinely binds us as readers, as human beings. As Banias says in another poem, “There’s something to be said for individuality, / multiplied.”

Pair with a six-pack of whatever you like. Share it with someone.

amy-watkins

Buzzed Books #49: Paper Girls

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

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Buzzed Books #49 by Whitney Hamrick

Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang

Paper Girls is an Eisner and Harvey Award-winning “Best New Series,” written by Brian K. Vaughn, famed author of fan favorites Y: The Last Man and Saga, and artist Cliff Chiang, of New 52’s Wonder Woman glory, who present a story often described as War of the Worlds meets Stand By Me or the natural inheritor of Stranger Things enthusiasts. Think Goonies or Monster Squad replacing all the wacky tropes with four solid gender-neutral characters.

paper-girls-1

Picture the suburbs, 1988, in the early morning hours after Halloween. Four 12-year-old girls deliver newspapers on their bicycles. On newbie Erin’s first day a group of teenage boys attempt to bully her until a small band of delivery veterans come to the rescue: smoking tough girl, Mac; loyal friend, KJ; and voice of reason, Tiffany.

The girls soon find themselves thrown into the impossible: parents and siblings, gone; neighbors, gone; symbol-speaking humanoids appear in metal armor zapping costumed kids to smithereens; teenage mutant space boys; war-horse dinosaurs: Quetzalcoatlus northropi take flight in an alien sky; and Kaiju-sized Tardigrades follow them through wormholes, which lead to the future and to an alternate reality. It’s the last day of life as they know it and they’re not going to take crap from anyone as they stumble through space and time as best they can.

paper-girls-detail

Action, suspense, cliffhangers, and surprise encounters: every issue is unexpected, especial when uncomfortable reminders of the 80s occur. The girls are not sugarcoated and they are not seeking romance. They are people, in some areas flawed, and I love them for it.

I wish I could have been one of these girls, when I was child. I wish I could do boy things and not feel like a disappointment or a cheap imitation.

I wish I could be tough and smart and confident, but when I was their age, I was not.

I was scared. I was made scared by the caution taught to me about my gender. I could be either passive and obedient or unattractive and unladylike.

I was compared and measured against other girls and there was always someone cuter, smarter, funnier, and better than me.

I grew up angry, defeated, and bitter.

It’s so hard to be a young girl. Hopefully, if you’re lucky, something clicks and you know who you are.

If you’re lucky, your parents walk with you at your pace.

If you’re lucky, you were born tough enough to brave the world as you are or want to be.

If you’re lucky, your outside matches who you are on the inside.

If you’re lucky, you’re outside isn’t less valued than someone else’s outside.

The opposition to simply existing, which so many girls, young women, and grown women feel, is our reality and only those who squeeze correctly through the societal sieve can ignore the pain of others.

For this reason, Paper Girls makes me hopeful I can reimagine my emotional past.

I want to be friends with these girls, but I think I’d have been intimidated by them at the age of twelve.

I wish I were one of them. Reading the series, issue by issue, allows me the chance to experience positive female relationships as though I can rub a Microsoft Paint eraser over the parts of my life that hurt.

These girls are battle-tested bad asses. They run like girls, fight like girls, protect each other like girls, and do so without giving in to fear. The first criticism I expect for my interpretation: why do I insist on self-actualized girl representation being a marvel; and my reply will be: I’m so happy that these girls exist on the page. I am so happy I get to hang out with them and that girls of any age can join in the fun, too.

My favorite arch thus far begins in Issue #6 when Erin encounter her future self. Future Erin takes Xanax, she works as a reporter for the newspaper that she once delivered, she’s 40 years old, and she’s worried she doesn’t meet her younger self’s expectations of adulthood. While on an adventure together, the future grateful hugs her past and they both have the perfect facial expression for where they are in life at that moment. I felt like I was hugging 12-year-old me when I read it.

paper-girls-2

More than the beautiful art and the compelling writing, I fell in love with the work of Colorist Matt Wilson. The pinks are passionate, the grays are bold and moody, and the blues fade steadily lighter in the same breath. It feels like it’s living and more than just representation of sky, houses, trees, clothing, and bicycles. The background has its’ own personality, but the main players look like old painted animation stills as they almost pop off the page. Wilson’s sense of lighting gives so much depth to every scene and a part of me imagines I could taste the story; I have yet to give into the impulse.

I will also posit that it is refreshing to see a man I trust with female characters continue to make me proud as his fan.

Let’s ride bikes. Let’s make 80s sci-fi references. And most importantly, let’s be girls. Let’s fight like girls for girls.

Issue #11 comes out on February 1, 2017.

_______

twbw-whitney

Whitney Hamrick (Episode 235) earned a college degree in something she doesn’t do professionally. She has participated in the LitLando community since her first reading at There Will Be Words in 2011. Since then she has received two Best of There Will Be Words nominations, her work can be seen in Ghost Parachute, and she can be found on twitter: @karmafishwrap.

Buzzed Books #48: Vu Tran’s Dragonfish

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

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Dragonfish, vu tran

Buzzed Books #48 by Shawn McKee

Vu Tran’s Dragonfish

Dragonfish

Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish (2015), reads like a neo-noir, existential thriller. The characters are calculating, the dialogue sharp, and the narrative immersive and intriguing. Tran gives these characters a sense of displacement and a yearning to connect with the past, despite the traumas awaiting such nostalgic endeavors. This is a novel of fragile emotional reconciliation where resolution is as foreign a concept as transformative redemption. Here, the search for answers is an endless venture not relegated to conventional standards.

Robert Ruen, or “Bob,” is a middle-aged Oakland police officer. He is enlisted to aid in a most unusual task by the very man his wife married after leaving him. Robert’s narrative voice is spoken with isolated cynicism, resembling the reluctant anti-heroes who permeate modern-day noir. But this isn’t only his story. His estranged ex-wife, Suzy, a Vietnamese refugee, dominates nearly every page, from jarring flashbacks to first-person italic-laden entries to her equally estranged daughter, Mai.

In hauntingly lyrical fashion, Suzy represents the object of psychological desire for most of the characters. Robert struggles with the reasons why she left him eight years prior and into the arms of a Vietnamese smuggler and gambler named Sonny Nguyen who lives in Las Vegas. Memories of his volatile relationship with Suzy fill Robert with guilt over his failings as a husband and the verbal and physical violence that often brewed to the surface between them. That was all in the past, until Sonny’s henchmen arrive at Robert’s apartment, holding him at gunpoint for answers. Suzy has disappeared, and Sonny wants Robert’s help in finding her. Playing detective for a dangerous, unpredictable man of wealth and with no shortage of hired thugs on his payroll is a risky move for sure, but Robert discovers that he is every bit as concerned for Suzy’s whereabouts as is his nemesis.

And so begins a dysfunctional effort between two foes who soon discover that they may have more in common than they initially believed or ever wanted to consider. Robert’s journey through the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas brings him to several disturbing realizations about the past, and the threat of violence from Sonny or his thugs, if he should fail, is always prevalent. Perhaps the most troubling self-discovery Robert arrives at after days of frequenting pitiless casinos and shady clubs is that his marriage from Suzy was doomed from the start. She was and always would be an enigma:

“We were always going to fail,” he says. “On our honeymoon, I knew it. There was some denial there, but really I knew it was just a matter of time.”

Suzy’s story is delicately intertwined within the mystery narrative in the form of letters to the daughter she abandoned. Presented as whole chapters, Suzy’s words reveal a tragic upbringing in her Vietnamese homeland. She met her first husband, a captain in the air force, at seventeen. After she become pregnant with her daughter, her husband was ordered to Communist re-education camps, eventually never to return. Suzy’s given name, Hong, travels with her to a Malaysian refugee camp, following the fall of Saigon. It is there, we learn, where she first met Sonny Nguyen and his young son. Her letters reveal a conflicted soul, driven to near madness, but strong and determined to find a better life for her daughter. Persistence is a virtue evident in Hong’s Vietnamese culture, and the refugees who surround her share similar desires in finding a new and better life abroad:

“But that is another story,” she writes her daughter. “I have twenty years’ worth of stories I can tell you, each one inevitably a shadow of the other. Which ones do I tell you now?”

Divided into five parts, just under three hundred pages, Vu Tran’s Dragonfish, is clearly as fixated on Suzy/Hong Thi Pham as the male characters driven to find her. We never get much in ways of Robert’s background beyond his all-American cop persona. Much of that, however, is the point of a novel that presents noir from an immigrant point of view. The challenge of assimilation is a consistent theme as is the search for one’s identity. Transcending classic noir trappings, most of the characters play against type.

Robert lacks a definitive character arc, which seems intentional, considering that his detective skills are not the main force behind the narrative. Sonny and his son, Jonathan, or Sonny Jr., are menacing as they partake in their own corrupt version of the American dream, but they are far from criminal masterminds and can be quite sympathetic at times, despite their impulses.

Suzy’s daughter, Mai, is strong-willed and independent, unshackled by American or Vietnamese culture. She plays neither Femme Fatale or damsel in distress. Victor, a henchman who defects against Sonny, and Happy, a close friend of Suzy’s who possesses her most intimate secrets, are both major players of the story who inadvertently provide Robert with some crucial answers throughout his serpentine quest, though he consistently remains an outsider, pleading, at one point, for both Happy and Mai to speak English during a heated conversation between the two.

The femme fatale, vengeful husband, and suitcase stuffed with stolen cash motifs are given a fresh, unique spin of dual narratives, redemptive and utterly soul-searching. When Robert attempts to understand the motivations behind Sonny’s search, Sonny Jr. cynically argues that Suzy was never Robert’s in the first place. Suzy/Hong, he explains, will always belong to them.

“America, Mr. Robert, is not the melting pot you Americans like to say it is. It’s oil and water. Things get stirred, sure, but they eventually separate and settle, and the like things always go back to each other.”

The frank refusal of integration and embrace of sameness speaks volumes of America today. Robert’s own bitterness about the cultural divide between him and Suzy erupts:

“You know why she married me? I was safe. I was a dumb American who would take care of her. Do shit for her. Protect her from whatever.”

In his debut novel, Tran plays the role of crime novelist well. His work echoes Walter Mosley, Mickey Spillane, and Sue Grafton, but it’s decidedly all his own. Such passages display his flawless establishment of mood, which is perhaps the story’s greatest strength: “As I tried to keep pace with Mai, a shiver of claustrophobia—of sudden loneliness—ran through me. Driving up into these casino garages, with their stark fluorescence and low ceilings, their serpentine corridors, felt more like a descent, a submersion into something airless.”

Dragonfish is a taut, poignant mystery that feels classic while transcending its genre conventions. Through its haunted visions, the world we know feels more vivid and real.

_______

Shawn McKee

Shawn McKee (Episodes 179, 184, 211, 229, and 230) is doing just fine.

Buzzed Books #47: Thomas Vinciguerra’s Cast of Characters

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Literary Magazines

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Cast of Characters, the new yorker, Thomas Vinciguerra

Buzzed Books #47 by Adelia Johnson

Thomas Vinciguerra’s Cast of Characters

Thomas Vinciguerra’s Cast of Characters by is a biography of the early days of The New Yorker. Though sometimes hard to follow due to the large quantity of “characters” mentioned, I found myself wanting to pick up my pen and start a journal of my own—and I never wanted to be a journalist. The New Yorker’s journey to success was an uncertain journey of trial, error, and willpower, a true hero’s journey.

Within each chapter, there were chronological jumps that were hard to keep track of , but the overall timeline worked, from the start of The New Yorker to E. B. White’s departure from the magazine on October 1st, 1985 with the final note that

the cartoonist Brian Duffy of the Des Moines Register seized on the Garth Williams illustration of Charlotte’s Web that depicted Charlotte having spun out the words SOME PIG. Duffy rendered a mournful Wilbur poised beneath the silken epigraph SOME WRITER.

The book does a final jump to 2007 when Vinciguerra visited the ex-wife of Tony Gibbs, the son of The New Yorker’s editor/essayist/critic Wolcott Gibbs.

The book explores the relationships at the office, including all of the shenanigans they would pull like playing poker with the different-colored routing slips as chips. There were a central group of people that the stories revolved around: the editor-in-chief Howard Ross; and writers and editors E. B. White, James Thurber and Wolcott Gibbs. Other recurring figures included Katherine White, Lois Long, St. Clair McKelway, Alexander Woollcott, John O’Hara, and Ralph Ingersoll.

Cast of Characters starts out on Fire Island with Gibbs reading a copy of his manuscript, quoting on page 2 “[Being on Fire Island] was a state of wonderful irresponsibility, a time in which you belonged to nobody but yourself, on which there were no immediate claims from the world.” Most of chapter 8, “A Silly Occupation for a Grown Man,” was dedicated to his becoming of a renowned theater critic. However, Vinciguerra was also keen on the personal lives of Ross, White, and Thurber, making sure to discuss their marriages and views of women.

Vinciguerra mimics The New Yorker’s style with passages like this one on page 177: “Thurber was so tickled by this doggerel that he adorned it with a caricature of himself waving at four stern-faced men labeled ‘Gibbs, Maloney, O’hara etc.’ with the impish greeting ‘Hi, Fellas!’” This made the reading more entertaining as well as it giving the reader a taste of how the magazine sounds without ever having to pick up a copy — but I doubt a reader would not want to after reading this. The reader also gets a taste of Timestyle during the chapter discussing the feud between The New Yorker and Time, adding a new flavor.

This book is not only a good inspiration to writers; I found myself being inspired as an editor, as well. In a quote by William Maxwell about Gibbs teaching him how to edit, Maxwell noted, “In time I came to feel that real editing means changing as little as possible.” Gibbs had thrown Maxwell headfirst into editing, offering only constructive criticism after the edits had been made, and even the criticisms were slim. But they got their point across.

Cast of Characters is a good introduction to those new to The New Yorker, and a good history of the magazine for those already well acquainted with it.

I was inspired not only to start something, but to be diligent, to be better. The New Yorker was made out of relentless fingers to keys, sleepless nights, and years of experience. I should be able to create something that’s at least good.

_______

adelia-johnson

Adelia Johnson (Episode 226) is a graduate of Full Sail University.

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Buzzed Books #46: Solmaz Sharif’s Look

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Poetry

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Buzzed Books #46 by Amy Watkins

Solmaz Sharif’s Look

look

In a September 2014 feature for the Kenyon Review Online, “A Poetry of Proximity,” Solmaz Sharif calls poets “the caretakers of language.” She writes:

The State exerts (or at least attempts) authority over us in many ways, including its use of language: passive construction, missing subjects, riotous chiasmus, etc. A combination of rhetorical flourish, euphemism, and passivity provide the State with the means to justify, formally, warfare. Today, the President of the Free World can have a kill list, can proclaim he is really good at killing, and there is hardly a shudder here. This is because our here is so small, because we are not hearing what is below the dead language. In a poem, our relationship to these languages change.

To resuscitate the dead language, to bring readers closer to the meaning those State-sanctioned euphemisms hide is the goal of Sharif’s first poetry collection, Look (Graywolf, 2016). To say that goal is significant seems like a grotesque understatement, particularly as I’m writing this on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Fifteen years later, Sharif demands our attention to the abuse, injustice, and inhumanity that are still part of the fallout of those attacks and the United States’ response to them.

Sharif uses terms from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, reappropriating the words, altering our “proximity” to them. In the title poem, the first in the collection, those terms form a humanizing argument that hinges on the word “look” (in military terms, “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence”):

Whereas I thought, if he would LOOK at my exquisite face

or my father’s, he would reconsider; […]

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is

your life? It is even a THERMAL SHADOW, it appears

so little, and then vanishes from the screen; […]

Let it matter what we call a thing.

The various meanings of the word “look” must be pondered: seeing, noticing, paying attention, but also–in the context of that military definition–being receptive to change, being open to another’s experience. The best poems in the book make us look. They remind me uncomfortably of the human beings on the far side of the dehumanizing language of the past decade and a half of war.

As in most collections, there are many very strong poems and a few that are less successful. In a few instances, the use of military terms feels forced, at least to my ear. Sustaining that premise in poems about family, personal relationships, and even politics is a challenge, which is better met in some poems than others.

At the end of the second and longest section in the book, Sharif includes a sequence of linked poems called “Reaching Guantánamo.” Each poem takes the form of a redacted letter, with blank spaces left where words have been erased. In some cases, the reader can fill in the blanks, but in others the missing words are mysterious–meaning and emotions, places and people lost to the State’s control of language. These are some of the strongest poems in the collection, and drive home the distance war has placed between the imagined letter writer and reader, the writer and censor, the words and their meanings.

Overall, Sharif’s Look is ambitious, intelligent, moving, important, and a little dangerous. After all, we let the state sanitize the language of war for a reason. It is poetry’s responsibility to return integrity to discourse for writers, readers, and citizens.

Pair this collection with a glass of Amaro Meletti, a bitter liqueur.

_______

Amy Watkins

Buzzed Books #45: In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Horror

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Buzzed Books #45 by Shawn Whittington

In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe

For those who savor Gothic lit, this anthology satisfies. Edited by scholar Leslie S. Klinger, this collection curates classical chilling tales, often of a dark Victorian flavor, written by literary authors such as Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H. P. Lovecraft, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

The title of this anthology originates from these stories’ obscurity, as Klinger claims they “have been lost in the shadow of Poe.” One thing that sets these stories apart from general horror stories is that these writers are more known for their contributions to literature, fantasy and science fiction. These authors are telling stories that happen to be sublime in their visions of horror rather than simply trying to spook or gross out the audience. There is a humanity there for which the reader can feel anxiety rather than mere anticipation of horrific occurrences. These seemingly bygone literary qualities feel refreshingly vibrant.

One of these curious techniques that occur in some of these stories is the breaking of the fourth wall. In this, the narrator (sometimes writing in the form of a letter) goes as far as to recognize and playfully observe upon the oddity his or her lengthy explanations. This self-awareness is almost post-modern, and diminishes one’s sense that these stories are mindlessly artificial stories.

An example of this can be found in the first story of the anthology, “The Sand-Man.” E. T. A. Hoffman depicts an account of a young man who slowly loses touch with reality and attempts to convey his convoluted concerns to his family members through verbose letters. When Hoffman interrupts the tale to remind the reader that this is a fictitious story, oddly this adds to the darkly psychological flavor of this central theme, the dangers of delusion.

Leslie S. Klinger’s thoughtful footnotes enrich these old-fashioned stories. An example can be found in “The Leather Funnel,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who portrays two gentlemen who conduct an experiment to determine the unknown history of a medieval torture device by dreaming next to the object. The protagonist experiences images of a notorious murderess who, in the 1600s, was accused of killing fifty people. At the very end of the story, a lengthy footnote provides shuddering details about the actual historical investigation of the murderess’s alleged accomplices, who were certain members of the bourgeoisie. This hysteria-driven investigation is spurred by the murderess’s recorded words in history, which is found in the last footnote rather than in the story itself. This footnote goes on to claim that these bourgeoisie members were later accused of poisonings and witchcraft after the murderess’s death sentence.

What makes this particular footnote intriguing is that not only is it, in a sense, a story within a story but also it amplifies the eerie tone for the ghastly visions the protagonist experiences, a final chill down the reader’s spine immediately after the last words of Doyle’s story.

Klinger’s carefully selected compilation is worthy of the Gothic reader’s library of horror, drama, and the bizarre.

_______

Shawn Whittington 2